At this point, a short digression may be permitted on the subject of clerical dress during the last century.

In the time of Swift and the ‘Spectator,’ clergymen generally wore their gowns when they travelled in the streets of London.[1102] But they wore them, so Hearne says, with a difference, very characteristic of those days of hot party strife.  The Tory clergy only wore the M.A. gown; ’the Whigs and enemies of the Universities go in pudding-sleeve gowns,’[1103] or what was otherwise called the ‘crape’ or ‘mourning gown.’  In the country the correct clerical dress was simply the cassock.  Fielding’s genius has made good Parson Adams a familiar picture to most readers of English literature.  We picture him careless of appearances, tramping along the muddy lanes with his cassock tucked up under his short great-coat.[1104] A clergyman, writing in 1722, upon ’the hardships and miseries of the inferior clergy in and about London,’ compares with some bitterness the threadbare garments of the curate with ’the flaming gown and cassock’ of the non-resident rector.  He could wish, he said (’if the wish were canonical’)[1105] that he might appear in a common habit rather than in a clerical garb which only excited derision by its squalor.  He thought it a desirable recommendation to the religious and charitable societies of the day, that they should make gifts to the poorer clergy of new gowns and cassocks.[1106] Soon, however, after Fielding’s time, the cassock gradually fell into disuse as an ordinary part of a clergyman’s dress.  It was still worn by many throughout the Sunday; but on week days was regarded as somewhat stiff and formal, even by those who insisted most on the proprieties.[1107] 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