Samuel Pepys.
I had occasion just now to speak of the Pepys Diary, and promised later and further talk about its author, whom we now put in focus, and shall pour what light we can upon him.[80]
He was a man of fair personal appearance and great self-approval, the son of a well-to-do London tailor, and fairly educated; but the most piquant memorial of his life at Cambridge University is the “admonition”—which is of record—of his having been on one occasion “scandalously over-served with drink.” In his after life in London he escaped the admonitions; but not wholly the “over-service” in ways of eating and drinking.
Pepys was a not far-off kinsman of Lord Sandwich (whom he strongly resembled), and it was through that dignitary’s influence that he ultimately came into a very good position in connection with the Admiralty, where he was most intrepid in his examination of tar and cordage, and brought such close scrutiny to his duties as to make him an admirable official in the Naval Department under Charles II. For this service, however, he would never have been heard of, any more than another straightforward, plodding clerk; nor would he have been heard of for his book about naval matters, which you will hardly find in any library in the country. But he did write a Diary, which you will find everywhere.
It is a Diary which, beginning in 1660, the first of Charles’ reign, covers the ten important succeeding years; within which he saw regicides hung and quartered, and heard the guns of terrific naval battles with the Dutch, and braved all the horrors of the Great Plague from the day when he first saw house-doors with a red cross marked on them, and the words “Lord, have mercy on us!” to the time when ten thousand died in a week, and “little noise was heard, day or night, but tolling of bells.” Page after page of his Diary is also given to the great fire of the following year—from the Sunday night when he was waked by his maid to see a big light on the back side of Mark Lane, to the following Thursday when two-thirds of the houses and of the churches of London were in ashes.
But Pepys’ Diary is not so valued for its story of great events as for its daily setting down of little unimportant things—of the plays which he saw acted—of the dust that fell on the theatre-goers from the galleries—of what he bought, and what he conjectured, and what his wife said to him, and what new dresses she had, and how he slept comfortably through the sermon of Dr. So-and-So—just as you and I might have done—never having a thought either that his Diary would ever be printed. He wrote it, in fact, in a blind short-hand, which made it lie unnoticed and undetected for a great many years, until at last some prying Cambridge man unriddled his cipher and wrote out and published Pepys’ Diary to the world. And it is delightful; it is so true and honest, and straightforward, and gossipy; and it throws more light upon the every-day life in London in those days of the Restoration than all the other books ever written.
There have been other diaries which have historic value; there was Hyde, Earl of Clarendon,[81] with some humor and a lordly grace, who wrote a History of the Rebellion—more than half diary—with sentences as long as his pages; but it does not compare with Pepys’ for flashes of light upon the accidents of life. There was good, earnest, well-meaning John Evelyn,[82] who had a pretty place called Says-Court (inherited through his wife) down at Deptford—which Scott introduces as the residence of Essex in his story of Kenilworth—who had beautiful trees and flowers there which he greatly loved. Well, John Evelyn wrote a diary, and a very good one; with perhaps a better description of the great London fire of 1666 in it than you will find anywhere else; he gives us, too, a delightful memorial of his young daughter Mary—who read the Ancients, who spoke French and Italian, who sang like an angel, who was as gentle and loving as she was wise and beautiful—whose death “left him desolate;” but John Evelyn is silent upon a thousand points in respect to which Pepys bristles all over like a gooseberry bush. Dr. Burnet, too, wrote a History of his Own Times, bringing great scholarly attainments to its execution, and a tremendous dignity of authorship; and he would certainly have turned up his bishop’s nose at mention of Samuel Pepys; yet Pepys is worth a dozen of him for showing the life of that day. He is so simple; he is so true; he is so unthinking; he is the veriest photographer. Hear him for a little—and I take the passages almost at random:
“November 9, 1660.—Lay long in bed this morning.
“To the office, and thence to dinner at the Hoope Tavern, given us by Mr. Ady and Mr. Wine the King’s fishmonger. Good sport with Mr. Talbot, who eats no sort of fish, and there was nothing else till we sent for a neat’s tongue.
“Thence I went to Sir Harry Wright’s, where my Lord was busy at cards, and so I staid below with Mrs. Carter and Evans, who did give me a lesson upon the lute, till he came down, and having talked with him at the door about his late business of money, I went to my father’s, and staid late talking with my father about my sister Poll’s coming to live with me—if she would come and be as a servant (which my wife did seem to be pretty willing to do to-day); and he seems to take it very well, and intends to consider of it.”
And again:
“Home by coach, notwithstanding this was the first day of the King’s proclamation against hackney coaches coming into the streets to stand to be hired; yet I got one to carry me home.”
Again:
“11th November, Lord’s Day.—To church into our new gallery, the first time it was used. There being no woman this day, we sat in the foremost pew, and behind us our servants, and I hope it will not always be so, it not being handsome for our servants to sit so equal with us. Afterward went to my father’s, where I found my wife, and there supped; and after supper we walked home, my little boy carrying a link [torch], and Will leading my wife. So home and to prayers and to bed.”
Another day, having been to court, he says:
“The Queene, a very little plain old woman, and nothing more in any respect than any ordinary woman. The Princess Henrietta is very pretty, but much below my expectation; and her dressing of herself with her haire frizzed short up to her eares did make her seem so much the less to me. But my wife, standing near her, with two or three black patches on, and well dressed, did seem to me much handsomer than she. Lady Castelmaine not so handsome as once, and begins to decay; which is also my wife’s opinion.”
One more little extract and I have done:
“Lord’s Day, May 26. After dinner I, by water, alone to Westminster to the Parish Church, by which I had the great pleasure of seeing and gazing at a great many very fine women; and what with that, and sleeping, I passed away the time till sermon was done.”
Was there ever anything more ingenuous than that? How delightfully sure we are that such writing was never intended for publication!
The great charm of Mr. Pepys and all such diary writing is, that it gives us, by a hundred little gossipy touches, the actual complexion of the times. We have no conventional speech to wrestle with, in order to get at its meaning. The plain white lights of honesty and common-sense—so much better than all the rhetorical prismatic hues—put the actual situation before us; and we have an approach to that realism which the highest art is always struggling to reach. The courtiers in their great, fresh-curled wigs, strut and ogle and prattle before us. We scent the perfumed locks of Peter Lely’s ladies, and the eels frying in the kitchen. We see Mr. Samuel Pepys bowing to the Princess Henrietta, and know we shall hear of it if he makes a misstep in backing out of her august presence. How he gloats over that new plush, or moire-antique, that has just come home for his wife—cost four guineas—which price shocks him a little, and sends him to bed vexed, and makes him think he had better have kept by the old woollen stuff; but, next Lord’s day being bright, and she wearing it to St. Margaret’s or St. Giles’, where he watches her as she sits under the dull fire of the sermon—her face beaming with gratitude, and radiant with red ribbons—he relents, and softens, and is proud and glad, and goes to sleep! This Pepys stands a good chance to outlive Butler, and to outlive Burnet, and to outlive Clarendon, and to outlive John Evelyn.
I may add further to this mention of the old diarist, that at a certain period of his life he became suspected—and without reason—of complicity with the Popish plots (of whose intricacies you will get curious and graphic illustration in Peveril of the Peak); and poor Pepys had his period of prisonship like so many others in that day. He also became, at a later time, singularly enough, the President of the Royal Society of England—a Society formed in the course of Charles II.s’ reign, and which enrolled such men as Robert Boyle and Sir Isaac Newton in its early days; and which now enrols the best and worthiest of England’s scientists.
I do not think they would elect such a man as Samuel Pepys for President now; yet it would appear that the old gentleman in his long wig and his new coat made a good figure in the chair, and looked wise, and used to have the members down informally at his rooms in York Building, where he made good cheer for them, and broached his best bin of claret. Nor should it be forgotten that Pepys had an appreciative ear for the melodies of Chaucer (like very few in his day), and spurred Dryden to the making of some of his best imitations.
When he died—it was in the early years of the eighteenth century—he left his books, manuscripts, and engravings, which were valuable, to Magdalen College, Cambridge; and there, as I said when we first came upon his name, his famous Diary, in short-hand, lay unheard of and unriddled for more than a hundred years.