our funerals, were customary
long before the eighteenth century began. In George III.'s reign a
prodigal expenditure on such occasions began to be thought less
essential. Before that time the relatives of the deceased were generally
anxious that the obsequies should be as pompous as their means would
possibly allow. It was still much as it had been in the days of Charles
II., when 'it was ordinarily remarked that it cost a private gentleman
of small estate more to bury his wife than to endow his daughter for
marriage to a rich man.'[1245] The bodies of 'persons of condition,'
and of wealthy merchants or tradesmen, were often laid out in state in
rooms draped with black, illuminated with wax candles, and thrown open
to neighbours and other visitors.[1246] Sometimes, as at Pepys' funeral,
an immense number of gold memorial rings were lavished even among
comparatively slight acquaintances.[1247]

Throughout the whole of the eighteenth century Church discipline was in
some respects a much greater reality than it is in our own day. No doubt
in its later years the difference lay more in possibilities than in
actual fact; so that the alterations in the law of excommunication made
by the Act of 1813, exceedingly important as they were to persons who
had come under censure of the ecclesiastical courts, had no very visible
or direct bearing upon the English Church in general. Excommunication
had been for some time becoming more than ever an unfamiliar word,
limited almost entirely to the use of law courts. When, therefore,
various obsolete practices relating to it were swept away and its
consequences rendered less formidable, it is probable that few but
lawyers were cognisant of any change. But in the first half of the last
century, amid a number of complaints that notorious vice so continually
escaped the formal censure of the Church, it is also evident that
presentments and excommunications were far from uncommon, and that even
open penance was not an excessive rarity. Episcopal instructions on the
subject are frequent. Thus Archbishop Sharp requests his clergy to be
very careful of anything like persecution; but where they cannot reform
habitual delinquents, such as drunkards, profane persons, neglecters of
God's worship, &c., by softer means, to take measures that they be
presented. He would then do all he could before proceeding to
excommunication. When that sentence had been actually denounced he
allowed the clergyman to ab