Cirrus@Austlit

At head of poem: 'The late Dr. Cockburn, Dean of York, was once preaching a charity sermon in the Abbey Church at Bath, when a poor Irish lad peeped in at the door and was mightily taken up with the Doctor's earnest manner of enforcing the necessity of "clothing the naked" and "feeding the hungry". At the conclusion of the service little Pat accosted the Dean as he was passing to his carriage, and said he was very hungry. The Doctor, who felt called upon to illustrate by practice the precepts he had been inculcating, ordered his servant to give the boy a good dinner and some old clothes. The lad was subsequently taken into the Dean's service, and the incident is referred to in the following lines.'

The poem 'Little Pat and the Parson' was published in Poems Written for a Child: By Two Friends (1869). The 'two friends' are sisters Menella Bute Smedley and Elizabeth Anna Parsons. The sisters identified authorship of the poems in their collection with the initials 'A' and 'B. It is not known which sister used which initial, although the initials can be matched to their middle names. Until authorship can be verified, both names are attached to this poem.