FullReads

This fate came to him because–as the world knows–it happened that for a period of ten years in comparative youth, he wrote an interesting and honest diary. He began this diary in 1659, while he was still a poor clerk living with his wife in a garret, and ended it in 1669, when, although he had emerged from obscurity, his greater honors had not yet been set on him. All the facts of his life during this period are put down, whether good or bad, small or large, generous or mean. He writes of his mornings spent in work at his office, of his consultations with higher officials. There is much running to and fro of business. The Dutch war bulks to a proper length. Parliament sits through a page at a stretch. Pepys goes upon the streets in the days of the plague and writes the horror of it–the houses marked with red crosses and with prayers scratched beneath–the stench and the carrying of dead bodies. He sees the great fire of London from his window on the night it starts; afterwards St. Paul’s with its roofs fallen. He is on the fleet that brings Charles home from his long travels, and afterwards when Charles is crowned, he records the processions and the crowds. But also Pepys quarrels with his wife and writes it out on paper. He debauches a servant and makes a note of it. He describes a supper at an ale-house, and how he plays on the flute. He sings “Beauty Retire,” a song of his own making, and tells how his listeners “cried it up.”

In consequence of this, Samuel Pepys is now known chiefly for his attentions to the pretty actresses of Drury Lane, for kissing Nell Gwynne in her tiring-room, for his suppers with “the jade” Mrs. Knipp, for his love of a tune upon the fiddle, for coming home from Vauxhall by wherry late at night, “singing merrily” down the river. Or perhaps we recall him best for burying his wine and Parmazan cheese in his garden at the time of the Fire, or for standing to the measure of Mr. Pin the tailor for a “camlett cloak with gold buttons,” or for sitting for his portrait in an Indian gown which he “hired to be drawn in.” Who shall say that this is not the very portrait by which we have fancied him stalking off to Commons? Could the apprentices have known in what a borrowed majesty he walked, would they not have tossed their caps in mirth and pointed their dusky fingers at him?

Or we remember that he once lived in a garret, and that his wife, “poor wretch,” was used to make the fire while Samuel lay abed, and that she washed his “foul clothes”–that by degrees he came to be wealthy and rode in his own yellow coach–that his wife went abroad in society “in a flowered tabby gown”–that Pepys forsook his habits of poverty and exchanged his twelve-penny seat in the theatre gallery for a place in the pit–and that on a rare occasion (doubtless when he was alone and there was but one seat to buy) he arose to the extravagance of a four-shilling box.

Consequently, despite the weightier parts of the diary, we know Pepys chiefly in his hours of ease. Sittings and consultations are so dry. If only the world would run itself decently and in silence! Even a meeting of the Committee for Tangier–when the Prince of Wales was present and such smaller fry as Chancellors–is dull and is matter for a skipping eye.

If a session of Parliament bulks to a fat paragraph and it happens that there is a bit of deviltry just below at the bottom of the page–maybe no more than a clinking of glasses (or perhaps Nell Gwynne’s name pops in sight)–bless us how the eye will hurry to turn the leaf on the chance of roguery to come! Who would read through a long discourse on Admiralty business, if it be known before that Pepys is engaged with the pretty Mrs. Knipp for a trip to Bartholomew Fair to view the dancing horse, and that the start is to be made on the turning of the page? Or a piece of scandal about Lady Castlemaine, how her nose fell out of joint when Mrs. Stuart came to court–such things tease one from the sterner business.