the prebendaries, and now (1779)
Dean of Salisbury, a finical man, who is always taking snuff, objected
to it, under pretence that it made his head to ache.'[1158]

The bad case into which Church music had fallen was much owing to those
worthy men, the Parish Clerks. These officials were a great institution
in the English Church of the last century. The Parish Clerks of London,
from whom all their brethren in the country borrowed some degree of
lustre, were an ancient and honourable company. They had been
incorporated by Henry III. as 'The Brotherhood of St. Nicolas.' Their
Charter had been renewed by Charles I., who conferred upon them
additional privileges and immunities, under the name of 'The Warden and
Fellowship of Parish Clerks of the City and Suburbs of London and the
Liberties thereof, the City of Westminster, the Borough of Southwark,
and the fifteen Parishes adjacent.'[1159] They had a Hall of their own
in Bishopsgate Street; at St. Alban's Church they had their anniversary
sermon; at St. Bridget's they had maintained, until about the end of the
seventeenth century, a 'music-sermon' on St. Cecilia's day;[1160] and
Clerkenwell derives its name from the solemn Mystery Plays which their
guild in old days used to celebrate near the holy spring.[1161] There
were certain taverns about the Exchange where they met as a kind of
Club, 'men with grave countenances, short wigs, black clothes or dark
camlet trimmed with black.'[1162] In pre-Reformation days they had
ranked among the minor orders of the Church as assistants of the
Priests;[1163] and so, especially in country churches, they might
consider themselves as holding a position somewhat analogous, though on
a humbler scale, to that of Precentors. In 1722 a clergyman, writing to
the Bishop of London on the subject of the poverty and distressed
condition of some of the poorer curates, spoke of the desirability of
again admitting men in holy orders to be Parish Clerks. Early in the
present century Hartley Coleridge made a somewhat similar suggestion.
'How often in town and country do we hear our divine Liturgy rendered
wholly ludicrous by all imaginable tones, twangs, drawls, mouthings,
wheezings, gruntings, snuffles and quidrollings, by all diversities of
dialect, cacologies and cacophonies, by twistings, contortions and
consolidations of visage, squintings and blinkings and upcastings of
eyes.... Then, too, the discretion assumed by these Hogarthic studies of
sele