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Evelyn & his literary contemporaries Isaac Walton & Samuel Pepys.

Among the prose writers of the second half of the seventeenth century John Evelyn holds a very distinguished position. The age of the Restoration and the Revolution is indeed rich in many names that have won for themselves an enduring place in the history of English literature. South, Tillotson, and Barrow among theologians, Newton in mathematical science, Locke and Bentley in philosophy and classical learning, Clarendon and Burnet in history, L’Estrange, Butler, Marvell and Dryden in miscellaneous prose, and Temple as an essayist, have all made their mark by prose writings which will endure for all time. But the names which stand out most prominently in popular estimation as authors of great masterpieces in the prose of this period are certainly those of John Bunyan, John Evelyn, and Izaak Walton. And along with them Samuel Pepys is also well entitled to be ranked as a great contemporary writer, though he was at pains to try and ensure his being permitted to remain free from the publicity of authorship, for such time at least as the curious might allow his Diary to remain hidden in the cipher he employed.

With the great though untrained genius of Bunyan none of these other three celebrated prose authors of this time has anything in common. He stands apart from them in his fervently religious and romantic temperament, in his richness of representation and ingenuity of analogy, and in his forcible quaintness of style, as completely as he did in social status and in personal surroundings. In complete contrast to the romantic productions of the self-educated tinker of Bedford, the works of Walton and Evelyn were at any rate influenced by, though they can hardly be said to have been moulded upon, the style of the preceding age of old English prose writers ending with Milton. The influence of the latter is, indeed, plainly noticeable both in the diction and in the general sentiment of these two great masters of the pure, nervous English of their period.

It would serve no good purpose to make any attempt here to trace the points of resemblance between the works of Walton and Evelyn, and then to note their differences in style. Each has contributed a masterpiece towards our national literature, and it would be a mere waste of time to make comparisons between their chief productions. This much, however, may be remarked, that the conditions under which each worked were completely different from those surrounding the other. Izaak Walton, the author of many singularly interesting biographies, and of the quaint half-poetical Compleat Angler or the Contemplative Man’s Recreation, the great classic “Discourse of Fish and Fishing,” was a London tradesman, while his equally celebrated contemporary John Evelyn, author of Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest Trees, the classic of British Forestry, was a more highly cultured man, who wrote, in the leisure of official duties and amid the surroundings of easy refinement, many useful and tasteful works both in prose and poetry, ranging over a wide variety of subjects. Judging from the number of editions which appeared of their principal works, they were both held in great favour by the reading public, though on the whole the advantage in some respects lay with Evelyn. But during the present century the taste of the public, judged by this same rough and ready, practical standard, has undoubtedly awarded the prize of popularity to Izaac Walton.

So far as the circumstances of their early life were concerned there was greater similarity between Walton and Pepys, than between either of them and Evelyn. Born in the lower middle class, the son of a tailor in London, and himself afterwards a member of the Clothworkers’ guild, Pepys was a true Londoner. His tastes were centred entirely in the town, and his pleasures were never sought either among woods or green fields, or by the banks of trout streams and rivers. His thoughts seem often tainted with the fumes of the wine-bowl and the reek of the tavern; and even when he swore off drink, as he frequently did, he soon relapsed into his customary habits. Educated in London and then at Cambridge, where his love of a too flowing bowl already got him into trouble more than once, he was imprudent enough to incur the responsibilities of matrimony at the early age of twenty-three, with a beautiful girl only fifteen years old. Trouble soon stared this rash and improvident young couple in the face, but they were spared the pangs of permanent poverty through the aid and influence of Sir Edward Montagu, afterwards Earl of Sandwich, who was a distant relative of Pepys. Acting probably as Montagu’s secretary for some time, he was first appointed to a clerkship in the Army pay office, and then soon afterwards became clerk of the Acts of the Navy. Later on, like Evelyn, he held various more important posts under the Crown, as well as being greatly distinguished by promotion to non-official positions of the highest honour. His official career was a very brilliant one, and deservedly so from the integrity of his work, from his application, despite frequent immoderation in partaking of wine, and from his business-like methods of work. As Commissioner for the Affairs of Tangier and Treasurer, he visited Tangier officially. He twice became Secretary to the Admiralty, and was twice elected to represent Harwich in Parliament, after having previously sat for Castle Rising. He was also twice chosen as Master of the Trinity House, and was twice committed to prison, once on a charge of high treason, and the other time (1690) on the charge of being affected to King James II., upon whose flight from England Pepys had laid down his office and withdrawn himself into retirement. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1665, he attained the distinction of being its President in 1684. He was Master of the Clothworkers’ Company, Treasurer and Vice-President of Christ’s Hospital, and one of the Barons of the Cinque Ports. In 1699, four years before he succumbed to a long and painful disease borne with fortitude under the depression of reduced circumstances, he received the freedom of the City of London, principally for his services in connection with Christ’s Hospital.

From the hasty sketch drafted in the above outlines, it will be seen that throughout all Pepys’ manhood the circumstances of his daily life and environment were much more similar to those of Evelyn than to those of Walton, who may well be ranked as their senior by almost one generation. Like Evelyn, Izaak Walton was rather the child of the country than a boy of the town. Born in Stafford in 1593, he only came to settle in London after he had attained early manhood. Thus, though a citizen exposing his linen drapery and mens’ millinery for sale first in the Gresham Exchange on the Cornhill, then in Fleet Street, and latterly in Chancery Lane, the Bond Street of that time, he ever cherished a longing for more rural surroundings and a desire to exchange life in the city for residence in a smaller provincial town. On the civil war breaking out in Charles the Ist’s time, he retired from business and went to live near his birth place, Stafford, where he had previously bought some land. Here the last forty years of his long life were spent in ease and recreation. When not angling or visiting friends, mostly brethren of the angle, he engaged in the light literary work of compiling biographies and in collecting material for the enrichment of his Compleat Angler. Published in 1653, this ran through five editions in 23 years, besides a reprint in 1664 of the third edition (1661).

In spite of the many similarities between Evelyn and Pepys as to university education, official position, political partisanship, and social and scientific status in London, there are yet such essential differences between what has been bequeathed to us by these two friends that comparison between them is almost impossible. They are both authors: but it was by chance rather than by design that Pepys ultimately acquired repute as an author, whereas Evelyn at once achieved the literary fame he desired and wrote for. Neither of the two works published by Pepys, The Portugal History (1677) and the Memories of the Royal Navy (1690), procured for him the gratification of revising them for a second edition, and it is indeed open to question if the Diary upon which his undying fame rests was ever intended by him to be published after his death. This is a point that is never likely to be settled satisfactorily. The fact of its having been written in cipher looks as if it had been compiled solely for private amusement, and not with any intention of posthumous publication; and this view is greatly strengthened by the unblushing and complete manner in which he lays aside the mask of outward propriety and records his too frequent quaffing of the wine-cup, his household bickerings, his improprieties with fair women, and his graver conjugal infidelities. The improprieties of other persons, and especially those of higher social rank than himself, might very intelligibly have been written in cipher intended to have been transcribed and printed after his death; but it would be at variance with human nature to believe that he could so unreservedly have reduced to writing all the faults and follies of his life had even posthumous publication of his Diary been contemplated by him at the time of writing it. For it is hardly capable of argument that, next to the instincts of self-preservation and of the maintenance of family ties, the desire to preserve outward appearances is undoubtedly one of the strongest of human feelings; and this great natural law, often the last remnant or the substitute of conscience, character, and self-respect, is even more fully operative in a highly civilised than in a savage or a semi-savage state of society. Of a truth, every human being is more or less of a Pharisee with regard to certain conventionalities of life. Complete disregard for the maintenance of some sort of standard of outward appearances is the absolute vanishing point of self-respect. Till that has been reached by any individual the hope of his reformation is not lost, though at the same time successful dissimulation makes the prospect of a turning point in a vicious career but remote. Still, “it is a long lane that has no turning.” It is therefore most probable that the leaving behind of the key to the cipher was rather due to inadvertence than to intention and design. And if this view be correct, then Pepys’ charming Diary was the purely natural outpouring of his mind without ever a thought being bestowed on authorship and ultimate publication.

With Evelyn’s Diary, however, it was different. Although it was not published until 1818, and though it may never have been intended by its writer to have been given to the world in book form, yet it was very clearly intended to be an autobiographical legacy to his family. Hence it is no mere outpouring of the spirit upon pages meant only for the subsequent perusal of him who thus rendered in indelible characters his passing thoughts of the moment. And this being the case, comparison between the two Diaries would be just as unfair as it is unnecessary. The one is the fruit of unrestrained freedom and a mirthful mind, while the other is the product of cultured leisure and a refined literary method. When Evelyn was Commissioner for the maintenance of the Dutch prisoners (1664-70) he had frequent communications with Pepys, then of the Navy, and there are special references to him in Evelyn’s memoirs. That an intimate friendship existed there is no doubt, and that they each held the other in great respect as a man of intellect, as well as of good business capacity, is equally clear. Thus, in June, 1669, he encouraged Pepys to be operated on ‘when exceedingly afflicted with the stone;’ and on 19 February, 1671, ‘This day din’d with me Mr. Surveyor, Dr. Christopher Wren, and Mr. Pepys, Cleark of the Acts, two extraordinary ingenious and knowing persons, and other friends. I carried them to see the piece of carving which I had recommended to the King.’ This was a masterpiece of Grinling Gibbon’s work, which Charles admired but did not purchase; so Gibbon not long after sold it for £80, though ‘well worth £100, without the frame, to Sir George Viner.’ Evelyn at this time got Wren, however, to promise faithfully to employ Gibbon to do the choir carving in the new St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Each of their Diaries teems with reference to the other. Pepys asked Evelyn to sit to Kneller for his portrait which he desired for ‘reasons I had (founded upon gratitude, affection, and esteeme) to covet that in effigie which I most truly value in the original.’ This refers to the well-known portrait, now at Wotton, that has been copied and engraved.

It appears to have been begun in October, 1685, but it was not till July, 1689, that the commission was actually completed. The portrait exhibits the face of an elderly man distinctly of a high-strung and nervous temperament, though not quite to the extent of being ‘sicklied oer with the pale caste of thought.’ His right hand, too, which grasps his Sylva is one very characteristic of the nervous disposition. A bright, shrewd intellect, lofty thoughts, high motives, good resolves, and—last, tho’ by no means least—a serene mind, the mens conscia recti which Pepys bluntly called ‘a little conceitedness,’ are all stamped upon his well-marked and not unshapely features. It is eminently the face of a philosopher, an enthusiast, a studious scholar, and a gentleman.