eclared he was very well satisfied with the little ceremony which was
used towards God Almighty, but at the same time he feared he was not
well bred enough to be a convert.'[1068]

Addison, however, and his fellow-writers, who might be abundantly quoted
to a similar effect, succeeded in making their readers more sensible
than they had been of the impropriety of all such conduct. During the
latter half of the century, the careless and undevout could no longer
have ventured, without fear of censure, on the irreverent familiarities
in church which they could have freely indulged in for the first twenty
years of it.[1069]

Polwhele, remarks that in Truro Church, about the year 1800, he had seen
several people sitting with their hats on,[1070] as they might have done
at Geneva, or in the time of the older Puritans. This, however, was
something wholly exceptional at that date. One of the things which had
displeased English Churchmen in William the Third was this Dutch habit.
He so far yielded to their feeling as to uncover during the prayers, but
put on his hat again for the sermon.[1071] A minute in the
Representation of the Lower House of Convocation, during their session
of 1701,[1072] shows that this irreverent custom was then not very
unfrequent. After all, this was but a very little matter as compared
with gross desecrations such as happened here and there in remote
country places during the last ten years of the preceding century.
'Amongst the Lambeth archives is a very long letter by Edmund Bowerman,
vicar of Codrington, who gives a curious account of his parish. The
people played cards on the communion table; and when they met to choose
churchwardens, sat with their hats on, smoking and drinking, the clerk
gravely saying, with a pipe in his mouth, that such had been the
practice for the last sixty years.'[1073] This was in 1692. In 1693,
Queen Mary wrote to Dean Hooper that she had been to Canterbury
Cathedral for the Sunday morning service, and in the afternoon went to
a parish church. 'She heard there a very good sermon, but she thought
herself in a Dutch church, for the people stood on the communion table
to look at her.'[1074]

Throughout the eighteenth century, a variety of secular matters used to
be published, sometimes by custom and sometimes by law, during the time
of divine service. In a general ignorance of letters, when a paper on
the church door would have been an almost useless form, such notices
were