Parish Clerks and Politics (Vol. viii., p. 56.).—In the excitement prevalent at the trial of Queen Caroline, I remember a choir, in a village not a hundred miles from Wallingford, Berks, singing
with great gusto the 1st, 4th, 11th, and 12th verses of 35th Psalm in Tate and Brady's New Version.
Wm. Hazel.
Phantom Bells—"The Death Bell" (Vol. vii. passim).—I have never met, in any work on folk-lore and popular superstitions, any mention of that unearthly bell, whose sound is borne on the death-wind, and heralds his doom to the hearer. Mickle alludes to it in his fine ballad of "Cumnor Halle:"
"The death-belle thrice was heard to ring,
An aerial voice was heard to calle,
And thrice the raven flapp'd its wing,
Arounde the towers of Cumnor Halle."
And Rogers, in his lines "To an Old Oak:"
"There once the steel-clad knight reclined,