University of Cambridge, and probably went through his studies with success. Early in life he took one of those decided steps which tend, according to circumstances, to a man's marring or making. He appears to have married a beautiful girl of fifteen, when he himself was only about twenty-three. The patronage of his relation Sir Edward Montagu, afterwards first Earl of Sandwich, prevented the ill consequences with which such a step might naturally have been attended, and young Pepys' talents for business soon came to render him useful. The distresses of the young couple at this period were subjects of pleasant reflection during their prosperity, for, 25th February, 1667, we find this entry in the diary.

"Lay long in bed, talking with pleasure with my poor wife, how she used to make coal fires, and wash my foul clothes with her own hand for me, poor wretch! in our little room at my Lord Sandwich's; for which I ought for ever to love and admire her, and do; and persuade myself she would do the same thing again, if God should reduce us to it."Vol. ii. 21.

p.

But better times were approaching Mr Pepys; he accompanied Sir Edward Montague upon his expedition to the Sound, in March, 1658, and upon his return obtained some species of clerkship in the Exchequer. Here the Restoration found him, poor but active, and well befriended by a patron who, having had no small share in the great event which had changed the fate of England, reaped his own proportion of the rewards bestowed by the Monarch amongst those who had favoured his restoration.

Through the interest of the Earl of Sandwich we find Mr Pepys nominated clerk of the Acts, by which style one of the commissioners of the navy board, continued within our own time to be distinguished. This was the commencement of his connexion with a great national establishment, to which, in the sequel, his diligence and acuteness were of the highest service. "From the mass of his Papers still extant, it may be inferred, that he never lost sight of the public good, and took infinite pains to check the rapacity of the contractors, by whom the naval stores were then supplied, and to establish such regulations in the dock-yards as might be productive of order and economy. He was also most anxious for the promotion of the old established officers of the navy, uniformly striving to counteract the superior influence of the court favourites, which too often prevailed in that unprincipled government over every claim of merit or service, and resisting to the utmost the infamous system of selling places, practised at that period, in every department of the state, in the most open and unblushing manner."-Life, p. xviii.-xix.

In the course of those dreadful afflictions, the plague and the fire of London, Pepys remained at his post, and behaved with a calm and deliberate courage more rare, and perhaps more valuable, also, than that which is merely constitutional, or which stimulates only

1

High Admiral, the diligent and useful Pepys was by degrees drawn into a close personal connexion with his royal highness, and, as he enjoyed his good opinion, he had also the misfortune to experience some part of the calumnies with which he was loaded during the cruel and infamous persecution commonly called "The Popish Plot," when a vertigo seemed suddenly to possess the heads of the people of England, rendering them incapable of distinguishing truth from falsehood, justice from oppression, or common sense from the grossest absurdity. The Earl of Shaftesbury, the foster-father of that most wicked delusion, showed a great desire to implicate Pepys in a charge of Catholicism, and even, it would seem, went so far as to spread a report, for it could be traced to no other quarter, that the clerk of the Acts had in his house an altar and a crucifix.* The absence of every thing like evidence, or even ground of suspicion, did not prevent Mr Pepys being committed to the Tower on the charge of being an aider and abettor of the plot, and he was, for a time, removed from the navy board. He was soon, by the special commands of Charles II., replaced in a sittuation where his skill and experience could not be well dispensed with; and rose afterwards to be Secretary of the Admiralty, which office he retained till the Revolution. It is remarkable, that James II. was sitting to Sir Godfrey Kneller for a portrait designed as a present to Pepys, when the news of the landing of the prince of Orange was brought to that unhappy monarch. The King commanded the painter to proceed and finish the portrait, that his good friend might not be disappointed. In a prince, whose ideas of the danger were justly formed, and who was prepared to meet it by corresponding efforts, this would have been equanimity;-in James we must term it apathy. Pepys had been too much personally connected with the King (who had been so long at the head of the admiralty) to retain his situation under the new government; and he retired into private life accordingly, but without being followed thither, either by persecution or ill-will. He died in May, 1703, in part a victim to the stone, which was hereditary in his constitution, and to the increase of that malady in the course of a laborious and sedentary life.

The Diary now published comprehends the ten first years of Mr Pepys' official life, extending from January, 1659-60 to May, 1669. Lord Braybrooke informs us, that as Mr Pepys was "in the habit of recording the most trifling actions of his life, it became absolutely necessary to curtail the MS. materially, and, in many instances, to condense the matter, but the greatest care has been taken to preserve the original meaning." It would be unreasonable to find fault with this freedom, nor are we disposed to suspect that it has, in any

* These were the days, when a noble lord declared in Parliament he would not have so

respect, been misused. On the contrary, judging from the peculiar character of Pepys, so uniformly sustained through the whole diary, we feel perfect conviction that the pruning knife has been exercised with that utmost caution necessary for preserving the shape and appearance of the tree in its original state. It may, besides, be accounted very superfluous to wish for a larger share of Mr Popys' private thoughts and confidences, than are to be found in that space of some five or six hundred pages of royal quarto. But when will antiquarian eyes be entirely satisfied with seeing? The idea of a work being imperfect, from whatever cause, the restless suspicion that something has been kept back, which would have rendered the whole more piquant, though perhaps less instructive, will always, in spite of us, haunt the curious indagator after the minute curiosities of literature. "That cruel something unpossessed Corrodes and leavens all the rest."

But we will push these observations no further at present, than just to observe, that where contemporary documents are published for the use of the antiquary or historian, we think the editor will, generally speaking, best attain his purpose by giving a literal transcript of the papers in his hands; whatever falls short of this, diminishes, to a certain degree, our confidence in the genuine character of his materials—it is giving us not the actual speech of the orator, but the substance of what was spoken. When there exists no moral reason for suppression of particular passages, we are not fond of abridgments or castrations-especially in cases like the present, where, after all, the matter communicated is not always so interesting as the peculiar mode in which it is told. Nay, even when decency or delicacy may appear on the one hand to demand omissions, it comes to be, on the other, a matter of very serious consideration in how far such demands can be complied with, without actual injustice to the characters handled by the author, the self-supplied key to whose own character and dispositions is thus mutilated and impaired.

We must follow some species of arrangement in the view which we are about to give the reader of the contents of these volumes, and perhaps it will be as natural as any other, first, to consider those passages which affect Mr Pepys personally, and introduce us to a knowledge of his character; and here we are compelled in some measure to draw a comparison betwixt our journalist and his contemporary Evelyn, who has left a similar, and, at least, equally valuable record referring to the same period.

Evelyn and Pepys were friends, and it is to the credit of the latter that he enjoyed the good opinion of the former. Both were men of sound sense, both were attached to science and the fine arts, both were, generally speaking, of sober and studious habits, both were

mortified by the unkingly mode in which it was worn by the "merry monarch, scandalous, and poor," under whose authority it was their fate to live, and by whom they were, each in his degree, held in estimation. Both writers were, moreover, shrewd and sharp critics of the abuses of the times, had seen the reign of fanaticism and hypocrisy succeeded by that of open profligacy and irreligion, and were mortified and grieved spectators of an extent of licentiousness to which, perhaps, no other age could in England produce a parallel.

But yet the characters of the two diarists were essentially different, and the distinction, it must be owned, is not in favour of Pepys. This may, in some measure, be owing to the difference of their relative situations. Evelyn, highly born and independent in fortune, had been bred up in the principles of the cavaliers, and has been justly said to constitute one of the best and most dignified specimens of the old English country gentleman. The Restoration found him in his own place; he had nothing to repent of, nothing to sue for; was willing to view the conduct of his master with lenient eyes, but, having nothing to fear from the resentment of king or minister, was not obliged to wink at such vices as his conscience called on him to condemn. Pepys' original political opinions, on the other hand, though they must be considered as those of a boy, did not quite fit the great change which took place at the Restoration ;-of which he himself gives us the following naïve instance. "Here dined with us two or three more country gentlemen; among the rest Mr Christmas, my old school-fellow, with whom I had much talk. He did remember that I was a great Roundhead when I was a boy, and I was much afraid that he would have remembered the words that I said the day the King was beheaded (that, were I to preach upon him, my text should be- The memory of the wicked shall rot'); but I found afterwards that he did go away from school before that time."-Vol. i. p. 82. Again, when Sir John Bunch upbraided him that "it was a fine time for such as he who had been for Oliver to be full of employment, while the old cavaliers got none," he frankly owns that he answered nothing to the reproach, for fear of making bad worse. This alteration of opinion, which led Pepys to dread the tenacity of his old school-fellow's memory, may serve to indicate a little versatility of principle foreign to the character and practice of Evelyn. We must not, indeed, forget that he began life poor, the son of a mechanic, dependent upon a powerful relative, and was obliged for his own rise to use the prevailing arts of corruption (for so the giving presents to his superiors must be termed), and thus early tempted to judge with less severity even vices which he disapproved of, when practised by those on whose efficient services his advance in life must depend. But there was by nature, as well as by situation and habit,

seems to aspire to. He was, like Sully at the court of Henry IV., a contemner of the frivolities and foibles exhibited by the king and courtiers. Pepys' abhorrence of vice and of the dissipations of fashion was not of a character so decisive. Like Old Gobbo, he did "somewhat smack, somewhat draw to," he had a certain degree of indul gence towards the "upper abuses" of the times, which prevents the full effect of his censures, and would sometimes half persuade us that a quiet secret sip from the cup of Circe was a cordial "haud alienum a Scævolæ studiis." Thus, we find, he kept occasional company with Harry Killigrew, young Newport and others, wild rogues as any about town, whose mad talk made his heart ache. And although he tells us this was only for once, to know the nature of their life and conversation, yet the air of Vauxhall is not very favourable to rigid virtue when breathed in such society, and the question will occur whether it is for gravity to play at cherry-pit with Satan."-Again, a decent degree of censure is no doubt bestowed on those "Light o' Loves," who adorned the court and disputed the good graces of Charles, but their beauty is at the same time extolled in such terms as show the journalist's admiration of their persons had sometimes balanced, if not outweighed, his virtuous indignation at their improprieties.

Perhaps a contrast between the different modes in which those two journalists saw similar scenes, will be the best illustration of our meaning. And first remark the severe dignity with which Evelyn passes censure on the witty and worthless sovereign, for the levity of his conduct in public towards our old acquaintance Nell Gwynn. "I thence walked through St James's Parke to the garden, where I both saw and heard a very familiar discourse between [the king] and Mrs Nellie, as they called an impudent comedian; she looking out of her garden on a terrace at the top of the wall, and [the king] standing on the green walke under it. I was heartily sorry at this scene. Thence the king walked to the Duchess of Cleaveland, another lady of pleasure, and curse of our nation."*

The following is a similar passage of grave reprehension.

"This evening I was at the entertainment of the Morocco ambassador at the Duchess of Portsmouth's glorious apartments at Whitehall, where was a greate banquet of sweetemeates and musiq, but at which both the ambassador and his retinue behaved themselves with extraordinary moderation and modesty, though placed about a long table, a lady between two Moores, and amongst these were the King's natural children, viz. Lady Lichfield and Sussex, the Duchess of Portsmouth, Nelly, &c., concubines and cattle of that sort, as splendid as jewels and excesse of bravery could make them."

We must yet make room for another passage of Evelyn, the most striking of all, from the scene it records happening so soon before the death of the royal libertine.

"I can never forget the inexpressible luxury and profanenesse, gaming, and all dissoluteness, and as it were total forgetfulnesse of God (it being Sunday evening) which this day s'ennight I was witness of, the King sitting and toying with his concubines, Portsmouth,