Pepys was partial to having his portrait taken, and he sat to Savill, Hales, Lely, and Kneller. Hales's portrait, painted in 1666, is now in the National Portrait Gallery, and an etching from the original forms the frontispiece to this volume. The portrait by Lely is in the Pepysian Library. Of the three portraits by Kneller, one is in the hall of Magdalene College, another at the Royal Society, and the third was lent to the First Special Exhibition of National Portraits, 1866, by the late Mr. Andrew Pepys Cockerell. Several of the portraits have been engraved, but the most interesting of these are those used by Pepys himself as book-plates. These were both engraved by Robert White, and taken from paintings by Kneller.
The church of St. Olave, Hart Street, is intimately associated with Pepys both in his life and in his death, and for many years the question had been constantly asked by visitors, "Where is Pepys's monument?" On Wednesday, July 5th, 1882, a meeting was held in the vestry of the church, when an influential committee was appointed, upon which all the great institutions with which Pepys was connected were represented by their masters, presidents, or other officers, with the object of taking steps to obtain an adequate memorial of the Diarist. Mr. (now Sir) Alfred Blomfield, architect of the church, presented an appropriate design for a monument, and sufficient subscriptions having been obtained for the purpose, he superintended its erection. On Tuesday afternoon, March 18th, 1884, the monument, which was affixed to the wall of the church where the gallery containing Pepys's pew formerly stood, was unveiled in the presence of a large concourse of visitors. The Earl of Northbrook, First Lord of the Admiralty, consented to unveil the monument, but he was at the last moment prevented by public business from attending. The late Mr. Russell Lowell, then the American Minister, took Lord Northbrook's place, and made a very charming and appreciative speech on the occasion, from which the following passages are extracted:—
"It was proper," his Excellency said, "that he should read a note he had received from Lord Northbrook. This was dated that day from the Admiralty, and was as follows:
"'My dear Mr. Lowell,
"'I am very much annoyed that I am prevented from assisting at the ceremony to-day. It would be very good if you would say that nothing but very urgent business would have kept me away. I was anxious to give my testimony to the merits of Pepys as an Admiralty official, leaving his literary merits to you. He was concerned with the administration of the Navy from the Restoration to the Revolution, and from 1673 as secretary. I believe his merits to be fairly stated in a contemporary account, which I send.
"'Yours very truly,
"'NORTHBROOK.
"The contemporary account, which Lord Northbrook was good enough to
send him, said:
"'Pepys was, without exception, the greatest and most useful Minister that ever filled the same situations in England, the acts and registers of the Admiralty proving this beyond contradiction. The principal rules and establishments in present use in these offices are well known to have been of his introducing, and most of the officers serving therein since the Restoration, of his bringing- up. He was a most studious promoter and strenuous asserter of order and discipline. Sobriety, diligence, capacity, loyalty, and subjection to command were essentials required in all whom he advanced. Where any of these were found wanting, no interest or authority was capable of moving him in favour of the highest pretender. Discharging his duty to his Prince and country with a religious application and perfect integrity, he feared no one, courted no one, and neglected his own fortune.'
"That was a character drawn, it was true, by a friendly hand, but to those who were familiar with the life of Pepys, the praise hardly seemed exaggerated. As regarded his official life, it was unnecessary to dilate upon his peculiar merits, for they all knew how faithful he was in his duties, and they all knew, too, how many faithful officials there were working on in obscurity, who were not only never honoured with a monument but who never expected one. The few words, Mr. Lowell went on to remark, which he was expected to say upon that occasion, therefore, referred rather to what he believed was the true motive which had brought that assembly together, and that was by no means the character of Pepys either as Clerk of the Acts or as Secretary to the Admiralty. This was not the place in which one could go into a very close examination of the character of Pepys as a private man. He would begin by admitting that Pepys was a type, perhaps, of what was now called a 'Philistine'. We had no word in England which was equivalent to the French adjective Bourgeois; but, at all events, Samuel Pepys was the most perfect type that ever existed of the class of people whom this word described. He had all its merits as well as many of its defects. With all those defects, however perhaps in consequence of them—Pepys had written one of the most delightful books that it was man's privilege to read in the English language or in any other. Whether Pepys intended this Diary to be afterwards read by the general public or not—and this was a doubtful question when it was considered that he had left, possibly by inadvertence, a key to his cypher behind him—it was certain that he had left with us a most delightful picture, or rather he had left the power in our hands of drawing for ourselves some, of the most delightful pictures, of the time in which he lived. There was hardly any book which was analogous to it . .. . . If one were asked what were the reasons for liking Pepys, it would be found that they were as numerous as the days upon which he made an entry in his Diary, and surely that was sufficient argument in his favour. There was no book, Mr. Lowell said, that he knew of, or that occurred to his memory, with which Pepys's Diary could fairly be compared, except the journal of L'Estoile, who had the same anxious curiosity and the same commonness, not to say vulgarity of interest, and the book was certainly unique in one respect, and that was the absolute sincerity of the author with himself. Montaigne is conscious that we are looking over his shoulder, and Rousseau secretive in comparison with him. The very fact of that sincerity of the author with himself argued a certain greatness of character. Dr. Hickes, who attended Pepys at his deathbed, spoke of him as 'this great man,' and said he knew no one who died so greatly. And yet there was something almost of the ridiculous in the statement when the 'greatness' was compared with the garrulous frankness which Pepys showed towards himself. There was no parallel to the character of Pepys, he believed, in respect of 'naivete', unless it were found in that of Falstaff, and Pepys showed himself, too, like Falstaff, on terms of unbuttoned familiarity with himself. Falstaff had just the same 'naivete', but in Falstaff it was the 'naivete' of conscious humour. In Pepys it was quite different, for Pepys's 'naivete' was the inoffensive vanity of a man who loved to see himself in the glass. Falstaff had a sense, too, of inadvertent humour, but it was questionable whether Pepys could have had any sense of humour at all, and yet permitted himself to be so delightful. There was probably, however, more involuntary humour in Pepys's Diary than there was in any other book extant. When he told his readers of the landing of Charles II. at Dover, for instance, it would be remembered how Pepys chronicled the fact that the Mayor of Dover presented the Prince with a Bible, for which he returned his thanks and said it was the 'most precious Book to him in the world.' Then, again, it would be remembered how, when he received a letter addressed 'Samuel Pepys, Esq.,' he confesses in the Diary that this pleased him mightily. When, too, he kicked his cookmaid, he admits that he was not sorry for it, but was sorry that the footboy of a worthy knight with whom he was acquainted saw him do it. And the last instance he would mention of poor Pepys's 'naivete' was when he said in the Diary that he could not help having a certain pleasant and satisfied feeling when Barlow died. Barlow, it must be remembered, received during his life the yearly sum from Pepys of L100. The value of Pepys's book was simply priceless, and while there was nothing in it approaching that single page in St. Simon where he described that thunder of courtierly red heels passing from one wing of the Palace to another as the Prince was lying on his death-bed, and favour was to flow from another source, still Pepys's Diary was unequalled in its peculiar quality of amusement. The lightest part of the Diary was of value, historically, for it enabled one to see London of 200 years ago, and, what was more, to see it with the eager eyes of Pepys. It was not Pepys the official who had brought that large gathering together that day in honour of his memory: it was Pepys the Diarist."
In concluding this account of the chief particulars of Pepys's life it may be well to add a few words upon the pronunciation of his name. Various attempts appear to have been made to represent this phonetically. Lord Braybrooke, in quoting the entry of death from St. Olave's Registers, where the spelling is "Peyps," wrote, "This is decisive as to the proper pronunciation of the name." This spelling may show that the name was pronounced as a monosyllable, but it is scarcely conclusive as to anything else, and Lord Braybrooke does not say what he supposes the sound of the vowels to have been. At present there are three pronunciations in use—Peps, which is the most usual; Peeps, which is the received one at Magdalene College, and Peppis, which I learn from Mr. Walter C. Pepys is the one used by other branches of the family. Mr. Pepys has paid particular attention to this point, and in his valuable "Genealogy of the Pepys Family" (1887) he has collected seventeen varieties of spelling of the name, which are as follows, the dates of the documents in which the form appears being attached: