Chapel at Hereford,[861] the valuable wall-paintings at Salisbury,[862] the carved work of Grinling Gibbons at St. James’, Westminster,[863] shared, for example, the general fate, and were smothered in lime.  Horace Walpole, laughing at the City of London for employing one whom he thought a very indifferent craftsman to write their history, said he supposed that presently, instead of having books published with the imprimatur of an university, they would be ’printed as churches are whitewashed—­John Smith and Thomas Johnson, Churchwardens.’[864] How few churches are there that were not earlier or later in the last century emblazoned with some such like scroll!  But if whitewash conceals, it also preserves; it hides beauties to which one generation is blind, that it may disclose them the more fresh and uninjured to another which has learnt to appreciate them.

When it is said that the churches were kept in such tolerable repair that at all events they did not fall, it would appear that in many cases little more than this could be truthfully added.  Ely Minster remains standing, but more by good chance, if Defoe is to be trusted, than from any sufficient care on the part of its guardians.  ‘Some of it totters,’ he wrote, ’so much with every gale of wind, looks so like decay, and seems so near it, that whenever it does fall, all that ’tis likely will be thought strange in it will be that it did not fall a hundred years sooner.’[865] Such an instance might well be exceptional, and no doubt was so among cathedrals;[866] but a great number of parish churches had fallen, by the middle of the century, into a deplorable state.  Secker, in a charge delivered in 1750, gives a grievous picture of what was to be seen in many country churches.  ’Some, I fear, have scarce been kept in necessary present repair, and others by no means duly cleared from annoyances, which must gradually bring them to decay:  water undermining and rotting the foundations, earth heaped up against the outside, weeds and shrubs growing upon them ... too frequently the floors are meanly paved, or the walls dirty or patched, or the windows ill glazed, and it may be in part stopped up ... or they are damp, offensive, and unwholesome.  Why (he adds) should not the church of God, as well as everything else, partake of the improvements of later times?’[867] Bishop Fleetwood had observed forty years before,[868] that unless the good public spirit of repairing churches should prevail a great deal more, a hundred years would bring to the ground a huge number of our churches.  ’And no one, said Bishop Butler, will imagine that the good spirit he has recommended prevails more at present than it did then.’[869] As for cleanliness, Bishop Horne remarked that in England, as in the sister kingdom, it was evidently a frequent maxim that cleanliness was no essential to devotion.  People seemed very commonly to be of the same opinion with the Scotch minister, whose wife made answer to a visitor’s request—­’The pew swept and lined!  My husband would think it downright popery!’[870] One can understand, without needing to sympathise with it, the strong Protestantism of Hervey’s admiration for a church ’magnificently plain;’[871] but in the eighteenth century, the excessive plainness, not to say the frequent dirtiness, of so many churches was certainly owing to other causes than that of ultra-Protestantism.