ed vestment of the Church of England clergy. Not that it had
altogether outlived the unreasoning hatred with which it was regarded by
ultra-Protestants outside the National Church. It was still in the
earlier part of the century inveighed against by some of their writers
as 'a Babylonish garment,'[1088] 'a rag of the whore of Babylon,'[1089]
a 'habit of the priests of Isis.'[1090] In William III.'s time, its use
in the pulpit was evidently quite exceptional. The writer of a letter in
the Strype Correspondence--one of those in whose eyes a surplice was 'a
fool's coat'--making mention that on the previous day (in 1696) he had
seen a minister preach in one, added that to the best of his remembrance
he had never but once seen this before.[1091] During the next reign the
custom was more common, but was looked upon as a decided mark of High
Churchmanship. There is an expressive, and amusingly inconsequential
'though' in the following note from Thoresby's Diary for June 17, 1722:
'Mr. Rhodes preached well (though in his surplice).'[1092] In villages,
however, it was very frequently worn, not so much from any idea of its
propriety as what Pasquin in the 'Tatler' is made to call 'the most
conscientious dress,'[1093] but simply from its being the only vestment
provided by the parish. Too frequently it betrayed in its appearance,
'dirty and contemptible with age,'[1094] a careless indifference quite
in keeping with other externals of worship. At the end of the
seventeenth century many Low Church clergy were wont so far to violate
the Act of Uniformity as often not to wear the surplice at all in
church. They would sometimes wear it, said South, in a sermon preached
in King William's reign, and oftener lay it aside.[1095] Such
irregularities appear, however, to have been nearly discontinued in
Queen Anne's time.[1096] About this date, the growing habit among
clergymen of wearing a wig is said to have caused an alteration from the
older form of the surplice. It was no longer sewn up and drawn over the
head, but made open in front.[1097]

Those who abominated the surplice had looked with aversion on the
academical hood. Even in the middle of the eighteenth century, some Low
Church clergymen--they would hardly be graduates of either
University--objected to its use. Christopher Pitt, recommending
preachers to sort their sermons to their hearers, bids them, for
example, not to be so indiscreet as to 'rail at hoods and organs at St.
Paul'