The arch-tempter tries in vain to seduce him from the right path. "The house where swings the tempting sign," the smiles of damsels, have no power over him. He "shuns a flowing bowl and rosy lip," but he is not invulnerable after all. Want and avarice take possession of his soul. He begins to take by stealth the money collected in church, putting bran in his pockets so that the coin shall not jingle. He offends with terror, repeats his offence, grows familiar with crime, and is at last detected by a "stern stout churl, an angry overseer." Disgrace, ruin, death soon follow; shunned and despised by all, he "turns to the wall and silently expired." A woeful story truly, the results of spiritual pride and greed of gain! It is to be hoped that few clerks resembled poor lost Jachin.
A companion picture to the disgraced clerk is that of "the noble peasant Isaac Ashford [40]," who won from Crabbe's pen a gracious panegyric. He says of him:
"Noble he was, contemning all things mean,
His truth unquestioned, and his soul serene.
If pride were his, 'twas not their vulgar pride,
Who, in their base contempt, the great deride:
Nor pride in learning--though by Clerk agreed,
If fate should call him, Ashford might succeed."
[40] The Parish Register, Part III.
He paints yet another portrait, that of old Dibble [41], clerk and sexton:
"His eightieth year he reach'd still undecayed,
And rectors five to one close vault conveyed.
His masters lost, he'd oft in turn deplore,
And kindly add,--'Heaven grant I lose no more!'
Yet while he spake, a sly and pleasant glance
Appear'd at variance with his complaisance:
For as he told their fate and varying worth,
He archly looked--'I yet may bear thee forth.'"
[41] The Parish Register, Part III.
George Herbert, the saintly Christian poet, who sang on earth such hymns and anthems as the angels sing in heaven, was no friend of the old-fashioned duet between the minister and clerk in the conduct of divine service. He would have no "talking, or sleeping, or gazing, or leaning, or half-kneeling, or any undutiful behaviour in them." Moreover, "everyone, man and child, should answer aloud both Amen and all other answers which are on the clerk's and people's part to answer, which answers also are to be done not in a huddling or slubbering fashion, gaping, or scratching the head, or spitting even in the midst of their answer, but gently and pausably, thinking what they say, so that while they answer 'As it was in the beginning, etc.,' they meditate as they speak, that God hath ever had his people that have glorified Him as well as now, and that He shall have so for ever. And the like in other answers."
Cowper's kindliness of heart is abundantly evinced by his treatment of a parish clerk, one John Cox, the official of the parish of All Saints, Northampton. The poet was living in the little Buckinghamshire village of Weston Underwood, having left Olney when mouldering walls and a tottering house warned him to depart. He was recovering from his dread malady, and beginning to feel the pleasures and inconveniences of authorship and fame. The most amusing proof of his celebrity and his good nature is thus related to Lady Hesketh:
"On Monday morning last, Sam brought me word that there was a man in the kitchen who desired to speak with me. I ordered him in. A plain, decent, elderly figure made its appearance, and being desired to sit spoke as follows: 'Sir, I am clerk of the parish of All Saints in Northampton, brother of Mr. Cox the upholsterer. It is customary for the person in my office to annex to a bill of mortality, which he publishes at Christmas, a copy of verses. You will do me a great favour, sir, if you will furnish me with one.' To this I replied: 'Mr. Cox, you have several men of genius in your town, why have you not applied to some of them? There is a namesake of yours in particular, Cox, the Statuary, who, everybody knows, is a first-rate maker of verses. He surely is the man of all the world for your purpose.' 'Alas, sir, I have heretofore borrowed help from him, but he is a gentleman of so much reading that the people of our town cannot understand him.'