So much is said about the Park by the diarists Pepys and Evelyn, that the social life of the place may almost be pictured from their pages alone.
Pepys is always a delight. One may still see his famous MS. “Diary” in the Library of Magdalene College, Cambridge. It is in four or five volumes of shorthand, neatly written, with tidy margins, and the names of persons and places in well-formed letters in longhand. Presumably he did not intend it for publication, or he would not have written it in shorthand, and that of an extraordinarily complicated nature. Years elapsed before it was deciphered, and still more years passed before it became a classic in literature.
Samuel Pepys was the son of a tailor; but he became Secretary of the Admiralty, an appointment he filled most ably for many years. He was also President of the Royal Society. His mind was both as refined and as coarse as the age in which he lived. He jotted down the minutest details of the day. At his death he left his library to his old College, and, strange to relate, the double rows in the shelves were arranged by him according to size, and in no way according to subject, so that a tiny note-book of James I. in this remarkable collection comes number one.
John Evelyn, the contemporary of Pepys, has also left entries of his daily round for a period of about sixty years, made complete by a slight sketch of his life up to the time his Diary commences. He came from a good Surrey stock, Royalist to their heart’s core; but owing to the Great Rebellion he lived abroad for some years, returning to England in 1652, when he diligently wrote various books. Evelyn was later made a Fellow of the Royal Society, then newly founded, and now the most coveted position a man of science and learning can attain. From that time his work embraced various scientific subjects. Amongst them he laid before the Society observations on the growth of trees, which he afterwards fully discussed in Sylva. The early Reports of the Royal Society contain this quaint announcement: “Mr. Evelyn gave some account of the experiment recommended to him, of putting some flesh and blood in a vessel covered with flannel, in order to see what insects it would breed, and he observed that it bred nothing. He was requested by the Society to continue the Experiment.”
Bacteriologists who find such wondrous products and germs in blood must smile over his barren result.
As soon as the gaieties of the Park were revived we find Pepys to the fore, anxious to miss nothing. In the autumn of the Restoration year he writes:
“With Mr. Moore and Creed to Hide Park by coach, and saw a fine foot-race three times round the Park between an Irishman and Crow, that was once my Lord Claypole’s footman. Crow beat the other by above two miles.”
In the following year the Diarists both refer to the May-Day demonstrations as unsurpassed. Pepys was obliged to be out of town on business, and again expresses his regret at not being “among the great gallants and ladies, which will be very fine”; while one detects in Evelyn’s note the Royalist’s satisfaction over the Restoration: “I went to Hide Park” (he says) “to take the air, where was His Majesty and an innumerable appearance of gallants and rich coaches, being now a time of universal festivity.”
Pepys was more fortunate in reaching the Park on May Day, 1663, but he was not pleased: