SATIRICAL MANUSCRIPT Ad Clerum DON’T: Lessons of Experience from St Matthews Westminster

Croft has used a small quarto-sized exercise book bound in quarter black roan over marbled boards with his manuscript title label and name to the upper cover. Slightly different manuscript title on the first flyleaf with 37 pages of inked text and pencil illustrations to demonstrate his desiderata - followed by blanks.

Croft begins with an invocation: ‘When you preach [sketch] Don’t “paw the air” to emphasize what you say: It is not dignified.’ No group is exempt from Croft’s criticisms including Bishops ‘one anyhow’ and their Benedictions, the givers out of notes (’DON’T wash you hands like a shop-walker!’) and those who ‘Crouch like an old hen over the Altar’. There is no suggestion of publication though Croft who was priest-organist at St Matthew’s from 1887-1915 was an extensively published editor of works on church music and plain-song as well as being an occasional music critic for the London newspapers.