07] Ever since the
Restoration, the old strictness about clerical dress had become more and
more relaxed. The square cap had been out of favour during the
Commonwealth, and was not generally resumed.[1108] The canonical
skull-cap was next supplanted--not without much scandal to persons of
grave and staid habit--by the fashionable peruke.[1109] There is a
letter from the Duke of Monmouth, then Chancellor of Cambridge, to the
Vice-Chancellor and University, October 8, 1674, in which this
innovation is severely condemned.[1110] A few years later, Archbishop
Tillotson himself set the example of wearing the obnoxious
article.[1111] Many country incumbents not only dropped all observance
of the old canonical regulations, but lowered the social character of
their profession by making themselves undistinguishable in outward
appearance from farmers or common graziers. South spoke of this in one
of his sermons, preached towards the end of William III.'s reign.[1112]
So also did Swift in 1731.[1113] The Dean, however, himself seems to
have been a glaring offender against that sobriety of garb which befits
a clergyman. In his journal to Stella, he speaks in one place of wearing
'a light camlet, faced with red velvet and silver buckles.'[1114] Of
course eccentricities which Dean Swift allowed himself must not be taken
as examples of what others ventured upon. But carelessness in all such
matters went on increasing till about the seventh decade of the century.
After that time a number of remonstrances and protests may be found
against the brown coats, the plaid or white waistcoats, the white
stockings, the leathern breeches, the scratch wigs, and so forth, in
which clerical fops on the one hand, and clerical slovens on the other,
were often wont to appear. A writer at the very end of the century
pointed his remarks on the subject by calling the attention of his
brother clergy to the distinctly anti-Christian purpose which had
animated the French Convention in their suppression of the clerical
habit.[1115]

If a modern Churchman could be carried back to the days of Queen Anne,
and were at Church while service was going on, his eye would probably be
caught by people standing up where he had been accustomed to see them
sitting, and sitting down when, in our congregations, every one would be
standing up. Some people, following the common custom of the Puritans,
stood during the prayers.[1116] Some, on the other hand, sat during the
cree