Low Leighton (or Leyton), it will be remembered, was the parish in which John Strype fulfilled his ministry, and therefore it was in the pulpit of that distinguished ecclesiologist, that the writer of the extract beheld the phenomenon which startled him out of his propriety; if the surplice was worn by the Incumbent, or with his sanction, the circumstance would indicate that he regarded the usage as canonical, however it might have fallen into abeyance. Amongst the Lambeth archives is a very long letter by Edmund Bowerman, Vicar of Codrington, who gives a curious account of his parish, of the extreme ignorance and irreligion of the people, and of their desecration of the church. They played cards on the communion-table, and when they met to choose churchwardens, sat with their hats on, smoking and drinking--the clerk gravely saying, with a pipe in his mouth, that such had been the practice for the last sixty years. Not ten persons in the place had ever received the Sacrament; one used to take it by himself in brown bread and small beer.[409] An important change took place in the psalmody of the Church of England. The archaic version of the Psalms, by Sternhold and Hopkins, kept possession in cathedral and parish congregations until the middle of the reign of William III. Attempts had been made at improving the versification. _A Century of Select Psalms_, in verse, for the use of the Charterhouse, by Dr. Patrick, appeared in 1679. Richard Goodridge followed him by a similar effort in 1682. Dr. Simon Ford, not to mention others, attempted something of the same kind in 1688. But a more successful enterprise was accomplished by Nicholas Brady and Nahum Tate, who, in 1695, published a tentative _Essay_, and in 1696 a _Complete New Version_, differing from such as they themselves had previously prepared. This version, afterwards so popular, did not escape criticism; but was most determinately opposed by Dr. Beveridge, who preferred the old rhymes of the Reformation to any modern rendering of the Songs of David. His course of argument, if it had any force, would be fatal to any attempt at improving scripture translations of all kinds.[410] [Sidenote: CHARACTER OF THE CLERGY.] The character of the Clergy at that time has been drawn by different hands. Samuel Wesley, in the _Athenian Oracle_, said, that out of fifty or threescore parishes with which he was acquainted, he could not think of above three or four clergymen who disgraced their office. The Nonjurors represented their brethren in the Establishment as newsmongers and busy-bodies, guilty of non-residence, faulty in their morals, and negligent of their duties. Some were often seen frequenting ale-houses and taverns, where they behaved disorderly. The communion in the London parish churches, before largely attended, was, according to the same authority, unfrequented; and in cathedral churches things were worse, so that the alms collected did little more than pay for the bread and wine.[411]