for his virtue or skill; or else for some by-end or purpose, more than for the immediate Honour and Service of Almighty God and His Church."
If that was the case in rich and populous London parishes, how much more was it true in poor village churches? Hence arose the race of country clerks who stumbled over and miscalled the hard words as they occurred in the Psalms, who sang in a strange and weird fashion, and brought discredit on their office. Indeed, the clergy were not always above suspicion in the matter of reading, and even now they have their detractors, who assert that it is often impossible to hear what they say, that they read in a strained unnatural voice, and are generally unintelligible. At any rate, modern clergy are not so deficient in education as they were in the early years of Queen Elizabeth, when, as Fuller states in his Triple Reconciler, they were commanded "to read the chapters over once or twice by themselves that so they might be the better enabled to read them distinctly to the congregation." If the clergy were not infallible in the matter of the pronunciation of difficult words, it is not surprising that the clerk often puzzled or amused his hearers, and mangled or skipped the proper names, after the fashion of the mistress of a dame-school, who was wont to say when a small pupil paused at such a name as Nebuchadnezzar, "That's a bad word, child! go on to the next verse."
Of the mistakes in the clerk's reading of the Psalms there are many instances. David Diggs, the hero of J. Hewett's Parish Clerk, was remonstrated with for reading the proper names in Psalm lxxxiii. 6, "Odommities, Osmallities, and Mobbities," and replied: "Yes, no doubt, but that's noigh enow. Seatown folk understand oi very well."
He is also reported to have said, "Jeball, Amon, and Almanac, three Philistines with them that are tired." The vicar endeavoured to teach him the correct mode of pronunciation of difficult words, and for some weeks he read well, and then returned to his former method of making a shot at the proper names.
On being expostulated with he coolly replied:
"One on us must read better than t'other, or there wouldn't be no difference 'twixt parson and clerk; so I gives in to you. Besides, this sort of reading as you taught me would not do here. The p'rishioners told oi, if oi didn't gi' in and read in th' old style loike, as they wouldn't come to hear oi, so oi dropped it!"
An old clerk at Hartlepool, who had been a sailor, used to render Psalm civ. 26, as "There go the ships and there is that lieutenant whom Thou hast made to take his pastime therein."
"Leviathan" has been responsible for many errors. A shoemaker clerk used to call it "that great leather-thing." From various sources comes to me the story, to which I have already referred, of the transformation of "an alien to my mother's children" into "a lion to my mother's children."
A clerk at Bletchley always called caterpillars saterpillars, and in Psalm lxviii. never read JAH, but spelt it J-A-H. He used to summon the children from their places to stand in single file along the pews during three Sundays in Lent, and say, "Children, say your catechayse."
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