rather as a consecrated house under the care and protection of the Church.  It sounds somewhat like a paradox to assert that the exclusion from churches of all that is not distinctly connected with the service of religion was mainly due to the Puritans, of whose wanton irreverence in sacred buildings we hear so much.  Yet this seems certainly to have been the case.  Traces of the older usage lingered on, as we have seen, into the middle of the last century; but from the time of the Commonwealth they had already become exceptional anachronisms.

Before the century commenced pews had become everywhere general.  In mediaeval times there had been, properly speaking, none.  A few distinguished people were permitted, as a special privilege, to have their private closets furnished, very much like the grand pews of later days, with cushions, carpets, and curtains.  But, as an almost universal rule, the nave was unencumbered with any permanent seats, and only provided with a few portable stools for the aged and infirm.  Pews began to be popular in Henry VIII.’s time, notwithstanding the protests of Sir Thomas More and others.  Under Elizabeth they became more frequent in town churches.  In Charles I.’s time, they had so far gained ground as to be often a source of hot and even riotous contention between those who opposed them and others who insisted on erecting them.  Even in Charles II.’s reign they were exceptional rather than otherwise, and the term had not yet become limited to boxes in church.  Pepys writes in his ‘Diary’ on February 18, 1668, ’At Church; there was my Lady Brouncker and Mrs. Williams in our pew.’  On the 25th of the same month, we find the entry, ’At the play; my wife sat in my Lady Fox’s pew with her.’[879] Sir Christopher Wren was not at all pleased to see them introduced into his London churches.[880] During the luxurious, self-indulgent times that followed the Restoration, private pews of all sorts and shapes gained a general footing.  Before Queen Anne’s reign was over they had become so regular a part of the ordinary furniture of a church, that in the regulations approved in 1712 by both Houses of Convocation for the consecrating of churches and chapels, it is specially enjoined that the churches be previously pewed.[881] Twelve years, however, later than this they were evidently by no means universal in country places.  In 1725, Swift, enumerating ’the plagues of a Country Life,’ makes ‘a church without pews’ a special item in his list.[882] But ‘repewed,’ had been for many years past a characteristic part of formula which recorded the church restorations of the period.[883] There are plenty of allusions in the writings of contemporary poets and essayists to the cosy, sleep-provoking structures in which people of fashion and well-to-do citizens could enjoy without attracting too much notice—­

                   the Sunday due
    Of slumbering in an upper pew.[884]

In Swift’s humorous metamorphosis—­