The achievement of Old Scarlett with regard to his interring "the town's
householders in his life's space twice over," has doubtless been
equalled by many of the long-lived clerks whose memoirs have been
recorded, but it is not always recorded on a tombstone. At
Ratcliffe-on-Soar there is, however, the grave of an old clerk, one
Robert Smith, who died in 1782, at the advanced age of eighty-two years,
and his epitaph records the following facts:

Fifty-five years it was, and something more,
Clerk of this parish he the office bore,
And in that space, 'tis awful to declare,
Two generations buried by him were[49]!

[Footnote 49: _Ibid_. p. 121.]

It is recorded on the tomb of Hezekiah Briggs, who died in 1844 in his
eightieth year, the clerk and sexton of Bingley, Yorkshire, that "he
buried seven thousand corpses[50]."

[Footnote 50: _Notes and Queries_, Ninth Series, xii. 453.]

The verses written in his honour are worth quoting:

Here lies an old ringer beneath the cold clay
Who has rung many peals both for serious and gay;
Through Grandsire and Trebles with ease he could range,
Till death called Bob, which brought round the last change.

For all the village came to him