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.”