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.