SAMUEL PEPYS.
“August 6th, 1688. Waked betimes, and my wife at an hour’s warning is resolved to go with me; which pleases me, her readiness.... To St. James’s to Mr. Wren, to bid him ‘God be with you!’ and so over the water to Fox Hall; and then my wife and Deb. took me up, and we away to Gilford, losing our way for three or four miles about Cobham. At Gilford we dined; and I showed them the hospitall there of Bishop Abbot’s, and his tomb in the church; which, and all the rest of the tombs there, are kept mighty clean and neat, with curtains before them. So to coach again, and got to Lippook, late over Hindhead, having an old man a guide in the coach with us; but got thither with great fear of being out of our way, it being ten at night. Here good, honest people; and after supper to bed.
“7th. To coach, and with a guide to Petersfield. And so,” he says, “took coach again back” after dinner, and “came at night to Gilford; where the ‘Red Lyon’ so full of people, and a wedding, that the master of the house did get us a lodging over the way, at a private house, his landlord’s, mighty neat and fine: and there supped; and so” (the usual formula) “to bed.”
XXV
Another celebrated (or rather, notorious) person was used to lie here frequently on his journeys between town and the Isle of Wight. “Liberty” Wilkes had an estate at Sandown (he calls it “Sandham”), and when he was not busy agitating and be-devilling ministers in London, he was taking the sea-breezes in the Wight and writing innumerable letters to his daughter, Polly.
Statesmen must have breathed much more freely when the demagogue had left London and they were rid for a while, however short, of “his inhuman squint and diabolic grin.” If we are to believe his contemporaries and the portrait-painters, he was the ugliest man of his time, with the countenance of a satyr, to match and typify the low cunning and the obscenity of his crooked mind. “His personal appearance,” wrote Lord Brougham, “was so revolting as to be hardly human;” and, indeed, apologists for Wilkes’ character and appearance are singularly few among historians in these days, when it is the fashion to review by-past notorieties with the whitewash brush.
IMPIOUS REVELLERS