But there was generally one preservative at least to keep the rite from degenerating into a mere unedifying ceremony.  There was no period in the last century when the office and person of a bishop was not looked upon with a good deal of reverence among the people generally; nor is there any part of a bishop’s office in which he speaks with so much weight of fatherly authority as when he confirms the young.  And, besides, it would be very erroneous to suppose that there were not many bishops and many clergymen who did their utmost to make the rite an impressive reality.

That abominable system of clandestine marriages which reached its acme in the neighbourhood of the Debtors’ Prison in the Fleet, has been made mention of by many writers.[1239] Apart from these glaring scandals there had been up to that date much irregularity in marriages.  Banns were an established ordinance; but notwithstanding the remonstrances of some of the clergy, who urged, like Parson Adams, that the Church had prescribed a form with which all Christians ought to comply,[1240] they were, as Walpole says, ’totally in disuse, except among the inferior people.’[1241] Licences were obtained too easily,[1242] and not sufficiently insisted upon, and evening marriages were by no means unknown.[1243] After 1753 these abuses ceased.  But most readers will remember that until a very recent date Church feeling had not restored to their proper honour the publication of banns.  They were thought somewhat plebeian; and the high-fashionable and aristocratic method was to celebrate a marriage by special licence in a drawing-room, and with curtailed service.[1244]

The costly but ugly and unmeaning appurtenances which a simpler taste will soon, it is to be hoped, banish from 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]