Where we such clusters had
As made us nobly wild, not mad!
And yet such verse of thine
Outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine.”
Another Sun, that behind the Exchange, was a famous house frequented by Pepys; it was rebuilt after the Fire by John Wadlow, the host of the Devil Tavern, and son of the more famous Simon Wadlow whom Ben Jonson dubbed “Old Sym, the King of Skinkers.” Pepys often went with his colleagues to the Dolphin, and drank “a great quantity of sack” there. On April 25th, 1661, he “went to an ordinary at the King’s Head, in Tower Street, and there had a dirty dinner.” On June 21st, of the same year, we read, “This morning, going to my father’s, I met him, and so he and I went and drank our morning draft at the Samson, in Paul’s Churchyard.” On October 9th, he went after the theatre “to the Fleece tavern, in Covent Garden, where Luellin, and Blurton, and my old friend, Frank Bagge, was to meet me, and there staid till late, very merry.” This was the chief tavern in Covent Garden, but being the resort of bullies, it obtained a very unenviable notoriety. The Green Dragon, on Lambeth Hill, the Golden Lion, near Charing Cross, the Old Three Tuns at the same place, and the Pope’s Head, in Chancery Lane, are among the other taverns mentioned by Pepys. The Rhenish Wine-house, in the Steelyard, Upper Thames Street, was a favourite resort, and is frequently mentioned by the old dramatists. Pepys went there sometimes, but he more often visited another house so called in Cannon Row. All kinds of drinks were alike agreeable to our Diarist, and he did not even disdain “mum,” a strong beer brewed from wheat, which was once popular and sold at special mum-houses.
These constant visits to taverns were not very conducive to temperate habits of life, and we therefore read much of the midday revellings of the business men. One day, Pepys being a little more sober than Sir W. Penn, has to lead that worthy knight home through the streets, and on another occasion he resolves not to drink any more wine,—a rash vow which he forthwith breaks. Sometimes with amusing casuistry he tries to keep his vow to the letter while he breaks it in the spirit; thus, to allude again to the characteristic entry, on October 29th, 1663, we read, “Went into the Buttery, and there stayed and talked, and then into the Hall again; and there wine was offered, and they drunk, I only drinking some hypocras,[152] which do not break my vow, it being, to the best of my present judgement, only a mixed compound drink, and not any wine. If I am mistaken, God forgive me! but I hope and do think I am not.”
We have seen Pepys dividing his time pretty equally between the City and Westminster, and doing official work in both places. In Westminster Hall he was on friendly terms with all the shopkeepers who formerly kept their little stalls in that place, and most of the watermen at the different stairs, who recognized his genial face, were emulous of the honour of carrying him as a fare. There is an entry in the “Diary” which records a curious custom amongst the stationers of the Hall. Pepys went on January 30th, 1659–60, to “Westminster Hall, where Mrs. Lane and the rest of the maids had their white scarfs, all having been at the burial of a young bookseller.”
Two of the most important events in the history of Old London,—viz., the Plague and the Fire,—are very fully described in the “Diary.”
On the 7th of June, 1665, Pepys for the first time saw two or three houses marked with the red cross, and the words “Lord have mercy upon us” on the doors; and the sight made him feel so ill at ease that he was forced to buy some roll tobacco to smell and chew. Then we read of the rapid increase in the numbers of those struck down; of those buried in the open Tuttle-fields at Westminster; and of the unfriendly feelings that were engendered by fear.
Pepys remained either in town or in its neighbourhood during the whole time of the raging of the pestilence; and on the 4th of September, 1665, he wrote an interesting letter to Lady Carteret, from Woolwich, in which he said: “The absence of the court and emptiness of the city takes away all occasion of news, save only such melancholy stories as would rather sadden than find your ladyship any divertissement in the hearing. I have stayed in the city till above 7,400 died in one week, and of them above 6,000 of the plague, and little noise heard day or night but tolling of bells; till I could walk Lumber Street and not meet twenty persons from one end to the other, and not fifty upon the Exchange; till whole families, ten and twelve together, have been swept away; till my very physician, Dr. Burnet, who undertook to secure me against any infection, having survived the month of his own house being shut up, died himself of the plague; till the nights, though much lengthened, are grown too short to conceal the burials of those that died the day before, people being thereby constrained to borrow daylight for that service; lastly, till I could find neither meat nor drink safe, the butcheries being everywhere visited, my brewer’s house shut up, and my baker, with his whole family, dead of the plague.”