Idle Hours In A Library — Pepys And His Diary 2

* * * * * But now we will descend from the dignity of history—if these things belong to the dignity of history—to the plane of common every-day life.

Abandoning our quest for edification, we will wander for a little while about the Diary, for no other purpose than that of deriving what amusement we may from its personal banalities and social tittle-tattle.

Pepys tempts us to be as unsystematic and inconsequential as himself.

We will assume, therefore, the privilege which, according to Hazlitt, Coleridge so constantly abused in his conversational monologues—that of beginning nowhere in particular, and ending, if we see fit, in the same place.

It has been said that in Pepys’s ten years’ record there are more than five hundred references to dress and personal decoration.

I have not checked the statement, but I can easily believe it.

This gives, roughly speaking, an average of one such notice to each week covered by the journal.

Dress and the affairs of the toilet were indeed for Pepys always matters of serious importance, not to be disregarded in the midst of the greatest strain of public events.

We learn that at times Mrs. Pepys’s feminine desire for a new gown or some expensive bit of finery gave rise to domestic bickering and husbandly reproof, and that the money laid out on tailoring and haberdashery occasionally caused an uneasy hour.

Yet, with all his thrift, Pepys seems to have had a remarkably free hand when questions of this kind stood in the way.

He reports, without remorse, the payment of twenty-four pounds for a single suit—the best, he adds, “that I ever wore in my life”; and later on, notes the spending of eighty pounds for a necklace for his wife—though in this case he has misgivings.

It is sad to relate that, on the whole, our diarist was much less concerned about his own personal extravagances than about the extravagances of his better-half—a fact which shows us that husbands, like other conveniences of life, have been improved by the course of civilization.

At any rate, once noting, to his great sorrow and alarm, a month’s outlay of seventy-seven pounds on dress and its accompaniments, he adds that about twelve pounds of this had gone for his wife, and the small remaining balance—some fifty-five pounds—for himself.

Charity begins at home; but economy, like justice, often starts next door.

Pepys’s marital parsimoniousness frequently manifests itself in very petty ways; as when, for example, under date 14th February, 1666-7, he writes—“I am also this year my wife’s valentine, and it will cost me £5; _but that I must have laid out if we had not been valentines_.

” Once upon a time, Mr. and Mrs. Pepys went to the theatre together, and there they saw “Mrs. Stewart, very fine, with her locks done up with puffs, as my wife calls them, and several other great ladies had their hair so, though I do not like it; but my wife do mightily; but it is only because she sees it is the fashion.

” This is all very well as a piece of superior masculine judgment; but unfortunately our moralist betrays no such scruples when social opinion prescribes a new departure in his own accoutrement.

We notice with interest in the jottings of the journal the first appearance, or early reappearance, of several curious customs in dress.

Patches were used by Mrs. Pepys, for the first time “since we were married,” on 30th August, 1660; and on 12th June, 1663, after observing the growth of the practice then indulged in by ladies, of wearing vizards, or masks, at the theatre—a practice we can understand better as we come to know more of the character of the performances given on the Restoration stage,—Mr. Pepys goes forthwith to the Exchange “to buy things with my wife; among others, a vizard for herself.

” On 3d November, in this same year, he reports the adoption by himself of the new mode of wearing a periwig in place of the natural hair.

It went a little to his heart, we find, to part with his own head-gear.

However, he was somewhat reassured when, causing all his maids to look upon him, he observed their satisfaction with the result;

though he notes intense self-consciousness and some embarrassment when, the next day, he went abroad for the first time in his new guise.

About the same period he begins to shave himself—a performance which pleases him “mightily,” as promising to save both time and money.

“Up betimes and shaved myself,” so runs a later entry, “after a week’s growth; but Lord!

how ugly I was yesterday, and how fine to-day.

” One is sorely tempted here to reproduce a few of the many passages in which the vain old chronicler gloats over his handsome clothing, and the imposing figure cut by him at the theatre, or on the promenade, or in church.

But one or two must suffice as specimens:— “July 10, 1660. This day I put on my new silk suit, the first that ever I wore in my life.

” “Feb.

3, 1661, (Lord’s Day).

This day I first begun [sic] to go forth in my coat and sword, as the manner now among gentlemen is.

” “April 22, 1661. Up early, and made myself as fine as I could.

” “Oct 19, 1662, (Lord’s Day).

Put on my first new lace-band; and so neat it is, that I am resolved my great expense shall be lace-bands, and it will set off anything else the more.

” “May 17, 1668, (Lord’s Day).

Up and put on my new stuff suit, with a shoulder belt, according to the new fashion, and the bands of my vest and tunique laced with silk lace of the colour of my suit; and so very handsome to church.

” Alas, poor Pepys!

Where be your lace-bands now?

your shoulder-belts?

your rich silk vests?

The prominence of dress in the Diary may well surprise us, but we are scarcely less astonished by the amount of space given by our busy man of affairs to the most various kinds of pleasure and simple merrymaking.

Amongst the games in which Mr. Secretary Pepys seems to have found special satisfaction, tennis, ninepins, and billiards hold high place;

but these, after all, never yielded him a tithe of the pure enjoyment that he derived from his more intellectual pastimes, reading and music.

Pepys was a genuine musician; and we get the impression from the journal that his love of music reached the proportions of a real passion—the only passion, indeed, of his life.

On the other hand, he was not a systematic scholar, though he devoured books with avidity, keeping in touch with the literary output of his day, and at least tasting all sorts of things, from Cicero, the Hebrew grammar, and Hooker’s “Ecclesiastical Polity,” downward to Audley’s “Way to be Rich,” and the last-published comedy of the popular playwrights of his time.

Here are a couple of sample entries:— “Feb.

10, 1661-2. To Paul’s Churchyard, and there I met with Dr. Fuller’s ‘England’s Worthys,’ the first time that ever I saw it;

and so I sat down reading in it; being much troubled that (though he had some discourse with me about my family and arms) he says nothing at all, nor mentions us either in Cambridgeshire or Norfolke.

But I believe, indeed, our family were never considerable.

” “July 1, 1666. ...

Walked to Woolwich, reading ‘The Rivall Ladys’[4] all the way, and find it a most pleasant and fine writ play.

” Footnote 4: This is a tragi-comedy by Dryden, written partly in blank verse, partly in rhyme.

Pepys had seen it performed some two years before, and had then pronounced it “a very innocent and most pretty witty play.

” ----- Pepys’s passing opinions have not much critical value, but they are his own, which is more than can be said of many literary _dicta_ far more pretentious than his.

It is rather instructive to follow some of his fluctuations in taste.

We notice—to take a single illustration only—that when the first part of “Hudibras” was issued, he bought a copy for half a crown, having heard it much cried up for its pungent wit; but was so much disappointed when he came to dip into it, that he sold it again the same afternoon for eighteen-pence.

Still every one talked of the poem, and Pepys began to wonder whether he had given it a fair trial.

So a few days later he purchased another copy, resolved on closer study.

Now, I will venture to say that in this emergency poor Pepys kept himself by no means free from the sham admiration and cuckoo-criticism which is the bane of our drawing-rooms, and, for that matter, of some of our college classrooms, at the present day.

Had you met him in social gatherings, and had the talk turned on “Hudibras,” as it would almost certainly have done, then, doubtless, you would have found that Pepys, fearful of appearing deficient in acumen or taste, would have little or nothing to say about his adverse judgment, and might even consent to laugh perfunctorily at jokes he really did not think funny, and at doggerel rhymes which in his heart of hearts he held to be simply stupid.

Meanwhile, he confides to his Diary the expression of his honest opinion, promising himself that, on the appearance of the second part of the poem, he will borrow it from some friend, and buy it only if, on inspection, it should turn out to be better than the first part.

All this is surely edifying.

Here we ought perhaps to add that, in an ill-advised moment, Mr. Pepys undertook to learn to dance.

“The truth is, I think it a thing very useful for a gentleman, and sometimes I may have occasion of using it, and though it cost me what I am heartily sorry it should,” (he deeply deplores the payment of ten shillings entrance fee to the class,) “yet I am resolved to get it up some other way....

So, though it be against my stomach, yet I will try it for a little while.

” The subsequent introduction of a dancing-master, whose name was Pemberton, turned out, however, to be the introduction of a serpent into Pepys’s matrimonial Paradise.

Mrs. Pepys, crazy over the new accomplishment, insisted on his coming twice a day, which, as Mr. Pepys properly protested, was “a folly.

” Moreover, he by and by grew jealous of his wife’s attention to the said Pemberton, and some heartache and much petulance were the result.

Pepys gives us one graphic description of himself, too angry to join his wife at her lesson, yet walking up and down in his own chamber, “listening to hear whether they danced or no. ” But he presently became an adept in the art, and danced his own part, infinitely to his satisfaction, in many a corranto and jig.

For Pepys, as we have said, was a highly convivial person, and abandoned himself to the pleasure of the moment with an ardor and whole-heartedness which fill the grimly serious modern reader with something like amazement.

The thought of the morrow rarely for him disturbed the enjoyment of to-day, though with the coming of the morrow he sometimes found that he had applied himself to the good things of this life not wisely but too well.

Accounts of suppers, of social festivities kept up until ever so much o’clock in the morning, of mirthmaking of the most boisterous kind, abound in his pages, mixed up with matters of more serious import in quite a bewildering way.

Pepys will often round off some such detailed report with a characteristic comment expressive of deep satisfaction; as, for example, “mighty merry,” or “so home, mighty pleased with this day’s sport.

” _Carpe diem_ was evidently his counsel of perfection.

There is something charming about the man’s juvenile capacity for enjoyment, though we are frequently inclined to wonder how he managed in certain emergencies to keep his clear head and his steady hand.

Yet only occasionally does the journal record any marked reaction from even the most roistering overnight carousal.

Here, however, is just one case in point.

On 14th August, 1666,—in the midst, be it noted, of a good deal of mental disturbance caused by a misunderstanding between himself and Lord Peterborough,—Pepys describes at length an evening of wild frolic and buffoonery.

After dinner, with his wife and wife’s maid, Mercer (who played a rather prominent part in subsequent domestic unpleasantnesses), he takes a turn at the Bear Garden, where there is much wine-drinking.

“Then we supped at home, and very merry.

And then about 9 o’clock to Mrs. Mercer’s gate, where the fire and boys expected us, and her son had provided abundance of serpents and rockets;

and there mighty merry (my Lady Pen and Pegg going thither with us, and Nan Wright) till about 12 at night, flinging our fireworks and burning one another and the people over the way.

At last our businesses being most spent, we into Mrs. Mercer’s, and there mighty merry, smutting one another with candle-grease and soot, till most of us were like devils.

And that being done, then we broke up, and to my house, and there I made them drink;

and upstairs we went, and there fell into dancing (W. Batelier dancing well), and dressing him and I and one Mr. Banister ...

like women; and Mercer put on a suit of Tom’s like a boy, and mighty mirth we had; and Mercer danced a jig, and Nan Wright and my wife and Pegg Pen put on periwigs.

Thus we spent till three or four in the morning, mighty merry; and then parted and to bed.

” Do we wonder that the next day’s entry should significantly open—“Mighty sleepy; slept till past eight of the clock”?

As wine-bibbing, and even downright drunkenness, occupy so large a space in our record, it may be proper to note indications contained in it of the rise of domestic forces destined to do much in a quiet way towards the gradual improvement of general manners in this particular respect.

From the point of view of social history, there is much to interest us in Pepys’s occasional references to tea, coffee, and chocolate.

These three beverages found their way into England within a few years of one another, about the middle of the seventeenth century, cocoa leading the way, and tea bringing up the rear.

We have seen that on one occasion our diarist spoilt his bands by spilling chocolate upon them.

The coffee-house was an accomplished fact in his time.

There he often met distinguished men on business; there he passed many a chatty hour; there he once reports seeing “Dryden the poet ...

and all the wits of the town.

” For tea he never seems to have acquired special fondness.

I have marked but two references to it in the Diary.

Once, on 28th September, 1660, he notes: “I did send for a cup of tea (a China drink), of which I never had drank before,”—and unfortunately, for a wonder, he does not tell us how he liked it.

And again, on 28th June, 1667, he chronicles returning home to find his wife “making of tea, a drink which Mr. Pelling, the Potticary, tells her is good for her cold.

” Tea, by the way, was enormously dear in those days, and was supposed to possess astonishing and mysterious medicinal properties, concerning which we may read much in a broadside issued by Thomas Garway, the coffee-man of Change Alley,—a rare and curious document, a copy of which is still preserved in the British Museum.

It does not, of course, surprise us to learn that this pleasure-loving man of the town was a regular attendant at all the public amusements of his time.

He visited the cockpit, the bear-garden, the gambling-room, the prize-ring; though, much to his credit, he found little pleasure in these places of popular resort—a fact which makes it harder for us to understand his frequent presence at public executions, in witnessing which, as many entries serve to show, he found a curious kind of satisfaction.

On the other hand, his enthusiasm for everything connected with the theatre was simply unbounded; his Diary remaining to-day an important source of first-hand information on all matters pertaining to the drama of the Restoration.

From his miscellaneous jottings we gain a wonderfully vivid impression of the manners and customs of the playhouse of the period, together with a sense of life in things otherwise dead beyond recall.

For Pepys saw the great Betterton in all his glory, and was bewitched by the beautiful and fascinating Nell Gwynne.

When his record opens, boys were still playing female parts, as they had done in Shakspere’s time, and the introduction of women to the English stage is duly registered by him as an event.

He details, after his manner, all the odds and ends of scandal concerning prominent theatrical people; was himself on very friendly terms—somewhat too friendly at times for domestic peace—with various pretty actresses; and was an occasional visitor to that mysterious realm which lies behind the scenes.

Once in a while, however, he acknowledges the disillusion caused by such excursions.

The extremely human proportions into which the heroes and heroines of that magic stage-land dwindled when seen at close quarters,—the dust, noise, confusion, paint, powder, and general dinginess of the dressing-rooms and coulisses,—these are subjects of frequent remark.

Perhaps his most disenchanting experience was one connected with Nell Gwynne—“pretty, witty Nelly,” as he fondly calls her,—(we will not forget that the Diary was written in cipher).

He finds her once behind the curtain,—alas, that we should have to repeat it!

—swearing like a trooper because of the smallness of the audience.

Now, a small house is a trial sufficient to tax the philosophy of any actress; but we are sorry that pretty, witty Nelly, should have behaved herself in this way.

Pepys confesses that on this occasion he went home a sadder and a wiser man.

Let us not imagine that Pepys followed his career of pleasure without twinges of conscience and occasional remorse.

The expense involved frequently worried him, and again and again he reproved himself for wasting valuable time.

It saddened him once in a while, too, to realize that he could not say “No” when temptation came in his way,—“a very great fault of mine which I must amend in.

” Sometimes he argued the matter out to a logical issue; as, for instance, when, on 9th March, 1665, he writes:— “The truth is I do indulge myself a little more in pleasure, knowing that this is the proper age of my life to do it; and out of my observation that most men that do thrive in the world do forget to take pleasure during the time they are getting their estate, but reserve that till they have got one, and then it is too late for them to enjoy it.

” This eminently philosophical generalization appears to have given him a good deal of relief.

Still, the qualms would come, philosophy notwithstanding.

The thought of neglected business is like a death’s head at the feast when he dines once with Lady Batten and Madame Williams; and when, on another memorable occasion, he goes to the playhouse when he knows well enough that he should have been elsewhere, he is so thoroughly ashamed of himself that he sneaks in and takes a back place—only to be immediately singled out by an acquaintance, who spies him out from afar, and, much to his mortification, insists on sitting beside him.

Incidents of this kind are numerous enough to show us that the way of the transgressor was sometimes hard.

Pepys, however, managed upon occasion to get even with himself in these delicate matters by a very curious device.

He registered solemn vows,—as, for instance, not to drink wine for a specified period, or not to go to the play till after a certain date,—inflicting various penalties upon himself for infraction.

These penalties habitually took financial forms—payments to charities and the like; and we note that in cases of infraction—and these were sufficiently frequent—Pepys was more deeply concerned about the spent money than about the broken vow.

Moreover, it has to be acknowledged that some fine casuistry is now and then shown by him in the way in which he manages to elude the sense of an obligation while technically fulfilling its letter.

Under pledge not to touch wine, he consumes hypocras, a mixture of red and white wine with sugar and spices, and comforts himself with the extraordinary theory that this is, “to the best of my personal judgment, ...

only a mixed compound drink, and not any wine.

” Equally dubious are some of his theatrical doings.

Once he congratulates himself that he has kept his vow because he arrives at the playhouse too late to make it worth his while to go in—a really magnificent confusion of intention with result.

Once again, he allows an acquaintance to pay for him, and exonerates himself on the ground that he was taken to the performance, and did not, so to speak, take himself—did not, in other words, go as a free agent, and of his own impulse and will.

And on yet another occasion,—such is his subtlety,—he gets Mr. Creed to treat him in this way, actually lending the said Mr. Creed the money necessary for the purpose.

This, however, he felt to be going rather too far, even for an ethical theorist.

In reporting the incident, he adds that this “is a fallacy that I have found now once, to avoid my vow with, but never to be more practised, I swear.

” I said that in this part of my lecture I should make no attempt to maintain logical consistency.

This must be my excuse for leading you by an abrupt transition from the stage to the pulpit.

Pepys occasionally stayed at home on Sundays to work up his accounts, or look over his papers, and once (but he was sick that day) to read plays; but he was, on the whole, a faithful church-goer, and, as we have had occasion to observe, made special use of the Lord’s Day for a display of his new clothes and finery, a practice which to modern readers must needs seem both strange and reprehensible.

His notes of discourses heard by him are sometimes extremely interesting; while his criticisms—and he was evidently by no means easy to satisfy in the matter of sermons—are often as pungent and incisive as they are quaint and characteristic.

“A lazy, poor sermon,” he writes, after hearing Dr. Fuller.

Once he reports “an unnecessary sermon upon original sin, neither understood” by the preacher himself “nor the people”; and another time he hears a young man “play the fool upon the doctrine of Purgatory.

” Considerable space is given in his jottings to a certain poor young Scotchman, who had a perfect genius for preaching “most tediously,” and who becomes for Pepys a sort of type and standard of dulness and nebulosity.

Poor little Scot, thus to be pilloried to the end of time!

Pepys had, however,—let us put it euphemistically,—a wonderful power of withdrawing into himself, when the exercises of the pulpit became unusually trying—when, to adapt the phrase of Madame de Sévigné, a preacher abused the privilege preachers have of being long-winded and tiresome.

Over and over again he chronicles sleeping soundly through a sermon, and waking refreshed, if not edified, at the close.

“After dinner, to church again, where the young Scot preaching, I slept all the while.

”—“So up and to church, where Mr. Mills preached, but I know not how; I slept most of the sermon.

”—“So to church, and slept all the sermon, the Scot, to whose voice I am not to be reconciled [one would suppose that he had become pretty well reconciled to it, judging by its soporific influences] preaching.

” I pick these at random, as specimen entries.

There were seasons, however, when, the sermon being bad, and himself unable to achieve the benign relief of slumber, Pepys confesses to killing time in less innocent ways.

Susceptible to an extreme degree to feminine charms and graces, he often passed the hour of exhortation in looking out for pretty women, and in studying carefully their various styles of beauty and of dress.

Here are a few instances to the point.

“To church, where, God forgive me!

I spent most of my time in looking on my new Morena [brunette] at the other side of the church.

” So runs one of his confidences.

And again: “After dinner, I by water alone to Westminster to the parish church, and there did entertain myself with my perspective-glass up and down the 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 the sermon was done.

” He even reports that once, at St. Dunstan’s, in the midst too of an “able sermon,” he found himself beside a “pretty, modest maid,” whom “I did labor to take by the hand, but she would not, but got further and further from me; and at last I could perceive her to take pins out of her pocket, to prick me if I should touch her again, which seeing I did forbear, and was glad I did spy her design.

And then I fell to gaze upon another pretty maid in a pew close to me, and she on me; and I did go about to take her by the hand, which she suffered a little, and then withdrew.

So the sermon ended, and the church broke up, and my amours ended also.

” This time, by a transition strictly logical, we are led to speak for a moment about the most intimate side of Pepys’s domestic existence—his relations with his wife.

The subject is a difficult and delicate one; it is, moreover, too complicated to be dealt with in any detail here.

A few general words must suffice.

Their marriage had been one of love, and it can hardly be called, on the whole, an unfortunate one, in spite of many unhappy episodes and a good deal of misunderstanding; for even in the white glare of the Diary, where every fleck shows, their home life often comes out in a very pleasant light.

Still there were unquestionably, even from the very beginning, little rifts within the lute, and these rifts widen terribly, we notice, as the journal runs its course.

To the outside world, very probably, such rifts were not often apparent; but we are privileged to see matters close at hand, and from the inside; and this undercurrent of tragedy, beneath the broad stream of prosperity and success, becomes at times painfully manifest as we read.

I suppose it can hardly be said that in the case of Mr. and Mrs. Pepys’s various matrimonial difficulties, the entire blame rested on either pair of shoulders.

Mrs. Pepys was extremely pretty and attractive, and her husband admired her thoroughly, and was after his own rather singular fashion, devotedly attached to her.

Yet she was evidently whimsical, somewhat capricious, apt to get into what Pepys calls “fusty” humors, and at times exceedingly trying to the nerves.

Many a little crisis, not serious perhaps, but distinctly unpleasant, seems to have been brought about by a word unnecessarily spoken, a look or a phrase interpreted amiss.

But, after all, we fear that the main burden of responsibility rested with Pepys himself.

Why would he undertake to teach the poor young woman astronomy and arithmetic, when, admittedly, she had neither taste nor talent for such subjects?

Why was he so much upset on finding that her ear for music was not nearly as good as he thought it should have been?

Why did he cut her short so peremptorily on one most unfortunate occasion when she was telling that long-winded story of hers from “The Grand Cyrus”?

Why was he petulant with her, at another time, for no better reason, as he himself confesses, than that he was hungry, and she had dressed herself, as she not infrequently did, in a manner that displeased him?

Why, finally, when she was berating him rather roundly about her deficient wardrobe, did he fall to reading Boyle’s “Hydrostatics” aloud, “and let her talk till she was tired, and vexed that I would not hear her”?

It is surely, to say the least of it, far from tactful in a husband to declaim from a treatise on hydrostatics, when his wife is determined to discuss more serious matters.

These may be trifles; but such trifles are important things, when viewed from the standpoint of domestic peace.

But all this touches merely the fringe of the problem.

The really serious troubles were generally, if not always, caused by poor Mr. Pepys’s fatal over-sensibility—that characteristic weakness of his, to which he himself from time to time became only too keenly alive.

The simple fact of the matter is, that our diarist had a fondness for the society of pretty women; that his wife, naturally enough, grew jealous; and that all sorts of unpleasantness, deepening sometimes into genuine domestic tragedy, was the inevitable result.

I

have not time now to go into the ins and outs of what is really a very long story, to follow the rapid fluctuations of feeling, or mark out the converging lines of approach to the unavoidable catastrophe.

But I cannot resist the temptation of recounting one curious episode—that of a neat joke once played by Mrs. Pepys on her susceptible better-half.

Pepys, early in the period of the Diary, had fallen in with his wife’s desire to have a girl to live with them—a kind of companion and lady’s maid.

He did not like the expense incurred; but as long as the young lady was sufficiently well-favored to be a pleasant object to look on, he saw but little other cause for complaint—though cause for complaint, and good cause too, Mrs. Pepys was presently to find.

Well, on one occasion his wife told him she had engaged a new maid—a girl so pretty and winsome, she went on to say, that positively she was already jealous.

Mr. Pepys was a little uneasy about all this.

However, he concluded that she “meant it merrily,” and awaited with a good deal of ill-repressed excitement the coming of the domestic beauty.

In due season, Hebe arrived; and judge his astonishment and disgust, when he found, as he plaintively reports, that she was not pretty at all, but a very ordinary wench!

For once, at all events, the laugh was on Mrs. Pepys’s side.

Towards the latter part of the Diary the conjugal misunderstandings pass into a very acute stage, and for a time a break-up of the Pepys establishment seems imminent.

But we are glad to be able to record that the crisis was a comparatively brief one.

Mr. Pepys, sorrow-smitten and full of remorse over his recent ill-doings, undertakes to mend his ways, and sets manfully, though with some misgivings and much difficulty, about the task of so doing.

And thus the curtain falls upon what promises to be a complete reconciliation; and we close the Diary with the hope that the new peace lasted for the few brief years that were destined to elapse before the life of poor Elizabeth Pepys was brought to its untimely end.

There is one odd commentary on matrimony, which I must needs add for its characteristic strain.

Pepys, going to church one day, happens by accident to witness a wedding, and is much interested in what Thackeray described as “the happy couple, as the saying is.

” In chronicling this incident, he makes the following extraordinary remark: “Strange to see what delight we married people have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition, every man and woman gazing and smiling upon them.

” There is much still on the purely personal side of the Diary about which I should well have liked to speak; and, in particular, I had hoped to dwell for a little on Pepys’s notices of the Great Plague (which are much more interesting, as well as accurate, than Defoe’s well-known romancing book), and on his graphic account of the fire of London, which forms an admirable commentary on the second half of Dryden’s famous, if somewhat unmanageable, poem, “Annus Mirabilis.

” But these matters, and many other such, cannot now be even touched upon.

Meanwhile, in bringing these rambling memoranda to a close, I do not feel inclined to apologize for what may seem the frivolous character of my material.

The unique charm of Pepys’s Diary, as I said at the outset, lies very largely in the frankness, the naïveté, the unsophisticated directness of its record; it is, as I insisted, really and truly what other chronicles of the kind have been simply in name, a _journal intime_.

Something of this frankness, this naïveté, it has been my aim to illustrate, and to show you at the same time how quaint and startling are some of the results.

And let me ask you not to judge too harshly of the man into whose existence we have thus ventured to pry.

Remember that we have been privileged in his case to push aside the curtain which men habitually keep carefully drawn across the penetralia of their lives; that we have caught him often enough at unfair advantage, and in a light fiercer than that which, Tennyson says, beats upon a throne, blackening each blot.

At any rate, I, for my own part, see no reason why, as we lay his Diary aside, we should indulge in platitudes of criticism—still less, why we should console ourselves with the flattering thought of moral superiority.

Pepys was not a great man, it is true: he was often weak, often foolish; the temptations of the world again and again proved too much for him; at many important points, his theory and practice of life were alike unsound.

But it might be well perhaps, before we undertake to throw stones at his glass house, to look a little carefully into the vitreous mansion in which we ourselves dwell.

And if you and I were forced to lay bare, as he has done for himself, the secret thoughts and feelings, the passing fancies, the unspoken desires, the foibles and failures of our every-day existence, I wonder how many of us would see reason to be proud of the revelation so made.

O my brothers, let us be humble and charitable!

Humility and charity are excellent things; and humility and charity, I confess, I find constantly forced upon me whenever I dip, for an hour’s genuine amusement, into the Diary of old Samuel Pepys.

------------------------------------------------------------------------ Two Novelists of the English Restoration.

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