A bedstead of the antique mode,
Compact of timber many a load,
Such as our ancestors did use,
Was metamorphos’d into pews;
Which still their ancient nature keep,
By lodging folks dispos’d to sleep.[885]

Those of the more exclusive sort were often built up with tall partitions, like Lady Booby’s, ’in her pew, which the congregation could not see into.’[886] Sometimes they were curtained, ’sometimes filled with sofas and tables, or even provided with fireplaces;’[887] and cases might be quoted where the tedium of a long service, or the appetite engendered by it, were relieved by the entry, between prayers and sermon, of a livery servant with sherry and light refreshments.[888] Even into cathedrals cumbrous ladies’ pews were often introduced.  Horace Walpole tells an extraordinary story of Gloucester Cathedral in 1753.  A certain Mrs. Cotton, who had largely contributed to whitewashing and otherwise ornamenting the church, had taken it into her head that the soul of a favourite daughter had passed into a robin.  The Dean and Chapter indulged her in the whim, and she was allowed to keep a kind of aviary in her private seat.  ’Just by the high altar is a small pew hung with green damask, with curtains of the same, and a small corner cupboard painted, carved, and gilt, for birds in one corner.’[889] In Ripon Cathedral, some of the old tabernacle work of the stalls was converted into pews.[890] Everywhere the pew system remained uncontrolled, pampering self-indulgence, fostering jealousies, and too often thrusting back the poor into mean, comfortless sittings, in whatever part of the church was coldest, darkest, and most distant from sight and hearing.  Towards the end of the century its evils began to be here and there acknowledged.  The population was rapidly increasing in the larger towns; and the new proprietary chapels erected to meet this increase were often commercial speculations conducted on mere principles of trade, most unworthy of a National Church.  No reflecting Churchman could fail to be disgusted with a traffic in pews which in many cases absolutely excluded the poor.[891] Among the new churches there were in fact only one or two honourable exceptions to the general rule.  A free church was opened at Bath, another at Birmingham;[892] it appears that all the rest of these ‘Chapels of Ease’ unblushingly gave the lie, so far as in them lay, to the declaration of our Lord that the poor have the Gospel preached unto them.  Some time had yet to elapse before improved feeling could do much towards abating the unchristian nuisance.  But energetic protests were occasionally heard.  ‘I would reprobate,’ wrote Mrs. Barbauld (1790) ’those little gloomy solitary cells, planned by the spirit of aristocracy, which deform the building no less to the eye of taste than to the eye of benevolence, and insulating each family within its separate enclosure, favour at once the pride of rank and the laziness of indulgence.’[893] ‘It is earnestly to be wished,’ remarked Dr. Sayers about the same time, ’that our churches were as free as those of the continent from these vile incumbrances.’  Their injury to architectural effect was the least of their evils.  They were fruitful, he said, in jealousies, and utterly discordant to the worship of a God who is no respecter of persons.[894]