Born, in London(?), 23 Feb. 1633. Early education at a school at Huntingdon. At St. Paul’s School, London, as Scholar. Matric., Trin. Hall, Camb., 21 June 1650; removed to Magdalene Coll., as Sizar, 5 March 1651; B.A., 1653; M.A., 1660. Married Elizabeth St. Michel, 1 Dec. 1655. Sec. to Sir Edward Montagu, 1656–60. Clerk of the Acts, July 1660. Clerk of Privy Seal, July 1660. Justice of the Peace, Aug. 1660. Younger Brother of the Trinity House, Feb. 1662. Mem. of Tangier Commission, Aug. 1662; Treasurer, March 1665. F.R.S., 15 Feb. 1665. Surveyor-General of Victualling Office, Oct. 1665. Visit to France and Holland, 1669. Sec. for the Affairs of the Navy, 1673. M.P. for Castle Rising, Nov. 1673. Master of Trinity House, 1676 and 1685. Governor of Christ’s Hospital, 1676; Treasurer, 1698; Vice-Pres., 1699. Master of Clothworkers Co., 1677. M.P. for Harwich, 1679. Committed to Tower, on charge of Treason, 22 May, 1679; released March 1680. To Tangier with Lord Dartmouth, 1683. Pres., Royal Soc., Nov. 1684. M.P. for Harwich, 1685. Sec. of Admiralty, June 1686. Resigned office, March 1689. Imprisoned in Gate-house on charge of Treason, 25 June to July, 1689. Retired to Clapham, 1690. Died there, 26 May, 1703. Buried in St. Olave’s, Hart Street. Works: “The Portugal History” (under initials: S. P., Esq.), 1677; “Memoirs relating to the State of the Royal Navy” (anon.), 1690. Posthumous: “Diary,” ed. by Lord Braybrooke, 1825; ed. by H. B. Wheatley (8 vols.), 1893, etc.

Personal

  Memorandum: that Peapys and Hind were solemnly admonished by myself and Mr. Hill, for having been scandalously over-served with drink y^e night before. This was done in the presence of all the Fellows then resident, in Mr. Hill’s chamber.

  Last night, at 9 a clock, I did the last office for your and my good friend, M^r. Pepys, at S^t. Olave’s Church, where he was laid in a vault of his own makeing, by his wife and brother. The greatness of his behaviour, in his long and sharp tryall before his death, was in every respect answerable to his great life; and I believe no man ever went out of this world with greater contempt of it, or a more lively faith in every thing that was revealed of the world to come. I administered the Holy Sacrament twice in his illness to him, and had administered it a third time, but for a sudden fit of illness that happened at the appointed time of administering of it. Twice I gave him the absolution of the Church, which he desired, and received with all reverence and comfort; and I never attended any sick or dying person, that dyed with so much Christian greatnesse of mind, or a more lively sense of immortality, or so much fortitude and patience, in so long and sharp a tryall, or greater resignation to the will, which he most devoutly acknowledged to be the wisdom of God; and I doubt not but he is now a very blessed spirit, according to his motto, MENS CUJUSQUE IS EST QUISQUE.

  This day died Mr. Sam. Pepys, a very worthy, industrious and curious person, none in England exceeding him in knowledge of the navy, in w^ch he had passed thro’ all the most considerable offices, Clerk of the Acts, and Secretary of the Admiralty, all w^ch he perform’d with great integrity…. He liv’d at Clapham, where he enjoy’d the fruite of his labours in greate prosperity. He was universally belov’d, hospitable, generous, learned in many things, skill’d in music, a very greate cherisher of learned men of whom he had the conversation. His library and collection of other curiosities were of the most considerable, the models of ships especially. Besides what he publish’d of an account of the Navy, as he found and left it, he had for divers yeares under his hand the “History of the Navy,” or “Navalia” as he call’d it; but how far advanc’d, and what will follow of his, is left, I suppose, to his sister’s son Mr. Jackson, a young gentleman whom Mr. Pepys had educated in all sorts of useful learning, sending him to travel abroad, from whence he return’d with extraordinary accomplishments, and worthy to be heir. Mr. Pepys had been for neere 40 yeaers so much my particular friend, that Mr. Jackson sent me complet mourning, desiring me to be one to hold up the pall at his magnificent obsequies, but my indisposition hinder’d me from doing him this last office.

  The administration of the Admiralty under Pepys is still regarded as a model for order and economy.

  It is well known that the naval history of Charles II. is the most shining part of the annals of his reign; and that the business of the navy was conducted with the utmost regularity and prudence, under Charles and James, by this worthy and judicious person. He first reduced the affairs of the admiralty to order and method; and that method was so just, as to have been a standing model to his successors in his important office. His “Memoirs,” relating to the navy, is a well written piece; and his copious collection of manuscripts, now remaining, with the rest of his library, at Magdalen College, in Cambridge, is an invaluable treasure of naval knowledge. He was far from being a mere man of business; his conversation and address had been greatly refined by travel. He thoroughly understood and practised music; was a judge of painting, sculpture, and architecture; and had more than a superficial knowledge in history and philosophy. His fame among the virtuosi was such, that he was thought a very proper person to be placed at the head of the Royal Society, of which he was some time president.

  Though we laugh at Pepys with his cockney revels, and his beatitudes of lace and velvet, and his delight at having his head patted by Lord Clarendon, and his honest uproariness, and his not knowing; “what to think,” between his transport with the court beauties, and the harm he is afraid they will do the state—we feel that he ends in being a thoroughly honest man, and even a very clever one, and that we could have grown serious in his behalf, had his comfort or good name been put in jeopardy.

  The pronunciation of Pepys’s name has long been a disputed point, but although the most usual form at the present day is Peps, there can be little doubt that in his own time the name was pronounced as if written Peeps. The reasons for this opinion are: (1) that the name was sometimes so spelt phonetically by some of his contemporaries, as in the Coffee-house paper quoted in the “Diary” (ed. Mynors Bright, vol. vi. p. 292): “On Tuesday last Mr. Peeps went to Windsor,” &c.; (2) that this pronunciation is still the received one at Magdalene College, Cambridge; and (3) that the present bearers of the name so pronounce it.

  He must always be doing something agreeable, and, by preference, two agreeable things at once. In his house he had a box of carpenter’s tools, two dogs, an eagle, a canary, and a blackbird that whistled tunes, lest, even in that full life, he should chance upon an empty moment. If he had to wait for a dish of poached eggs, he must put in the time by playing on the flageolet; if a sermon were dull, he must read in the book of Tobit or divert his mind with sly advances on the nearest women. When he walked, it must be with a book in his pocket to beguile the way in case the nightingales were silent; and even along the streets of London, with so many pretty faces to be spied for and dignitaries to be saluted, his trail was marked by little debts “for wine, pictures, etc.,” the true headmark of a life intolerant of any joyless passage. He had a kind of idealism in pleasure; like the princess in the fairy story, he was conscious of a rose-leaf out of place. Dearly as he loved to talk, he could not enjoy nor shine in a conversation when he thought himself unsuitably dressed. Dearly as he loved eating, he “knew not how to eat alone;” pleasure for him must heighten pleasure; and the eye and ear must be flattered like the palate ere he avow himself content.

  In truth, Elizabeth had reason for the display of temper. Mr. Pepys, now a great man, in enlarging his scheme of pleasure gradually expands in a forbidden direction. Always sufficiently appreciative of a pretty woman, his interest in a handsome face grows with his opportunities, and there come occasions when the jealousy that arises in Elizabeth’s heart is not, like his green-eyed fits, without foundation. His heart is always faithfully hers, but his eyes note beauty in other faces than her own; and the manners of the age could not, in her opinion, excuse his predilection for kissing every pretty woman he might meet…. In spite of the remarkable brain, and the even more noteworthy honesty, that made him the important personage of his group, Samuel Pepys was naught but the tailor’s son, after all, with his eyes turned wholly toward the goods of the world and the attainment thereof; and Elizabeth, aside from her French cleverness and her beauty, had neither dignity nor nobility to aid her to order her life in a difficult age. She had the power to inspire in her husband the one love of his selfish heart; she had no capacity to control his roving fancy. Like a child in her love of frivolity, she was like a child still in meeting misery.

  Few men are better known than Samuel Pepys.

  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…. Pepys’s passing opinions have not much critical value.

Diary

  Of very great interest and curiosity…. Fortunately for the public part of the story, the author was, from the very beginning, in immediate contact with persons in high office and about court—and, still more fortunately for the private part, seems to have been possessed of the most extraordinary activity, and the most indiscriminating, insatiable, and miscellaneous curiosity, that ever prompted the researches, or supplied the pen, of a daily chronicler.

  If quitting the broad path of history we seek for minute information concerning ancient manners and customs, the progress of arts and sciences, and the various branches of antiquity, we have never seen a mine so rich as the volumes before us. The variety of Pepys’s tastes and pursuits led him into almost every department of life.

  It is an advantage to have the observations of a common mind, strong but coarse. We take a vulgar man’s account of his own times, written probably in the same spirit as household expenses are kept—for reference, and for his own eye alone. That eye was keen-sighted to foibles, sins, deceit, worldliness, and to every thing—its own interest more especially. We value our diarist for being of so little taste as to tell every thing, and of so slight a moral perception as to give everything the hue not of our age, but of his own. We value him that he tells us things as they were, and calls them by expressive names. He is the photographer of the Court of Charles the Second. His pictures are ugly, but accurate. Welcome, therefore, in his full bottomed wig, his long worked cambric tie, frilled at the end; welcome in his official robes, with his hand on a chart, a pair of compasses beside it,—with his violin in the gloom,—his globe, the implement of his office, at his side; welcome with his marked eyebrows, his long, narrow, shrewd eyes, his vulgar nose, his double chin, and full cheeks; welcome with his large, sensible, but sensual mouth—Samuel Pepys, as Kneller, in vulgarity a kindred spirit, has bequeathed him to a grateful posterity.

  No history gives us so clear an understanding of the moral condition of average men after the restoration of the Stuarts as the unconscious blabbings of the Puritan tailor’s son, with his two consciences, as it were,—an inward, still sensitive in spots, though mostly toughened to India-rubber, and good rather for rubbing out old scores than retaining them, and an outward, alert, and termagantly effective in Mrs. Pepys.

  The importance of Pepy’s “Diary,” historically speaking, may be summed up by saying that without it the history of the court of Charles II. could not have been written. We do not, it is true, gain from it any information as to what was going on in the country. Utterly destitute of imagination or political knowledge, Pepys could only record the sights and the gossip that were evident to all. It is because he did record these, without hesitation or concealment, that from his “Diary” we can understand the brilliancy and wickedness of the court, as well as the social state and daily life of the bourgeois class.

  It is scarcely literature—that is to say, there is neither art nor effort at construction; but Pepys has extraordinary picturesqueness and great capacity in describing what he has seen in the best and briefest words. Evelyn’s diary has a coldness, a dignity, in its ease, that suggest that he conceived that the world might force it into publication. Pepys believed himself absolutely safe behind the veil of his cipher, and he made no effort to paint the lily.

  And it is delightful; it is so true and honest, and straightforward, and gossipy; and it throws more light upon the everyday life in London in those days of the Restoration than all the other books ever written.

  Honoured Sir: It was the saying of a wise man, though a young one, that we do all of us travel through life with a donkey. You kept your donkey in a stable very private. The charger dwelt in that noted “Diary” of yours, a journal written in cipher, which has now for many years been transcribed in plain hand, and given to the world. Mr. Pepys, do not, I pray you, blush so fiery a red; not all the “Diary” hath yet been made public, and the world is still a stranger to many of those most private confidences between your donkey and yourself. Matters there be which I could mention, an’ I would, but I write for a generation in which they who read not are very modest, and will raise a cry against you and me, if I keep not a bridle on my pen. The record of a whole day in the sad story of Deb is omitted, concerning Knip and Pierce, and a certain other lady (oh fie, Mr. Pepys!) the world knows no more than the worthy minister, your editor, chose to tell it.

  In spite of all the research which has brought to light so many incidents of interest in the life of Samuel Pepys, we cannot but feel how dry these facts are when placed by the side of the living details of the “Diary.” It is in its pages that the true man is displayed, and it has therefore not been thought necessary here to do more than set down in chronological order such facts as are known of the life outside the Diary.

  There is possible misapprehension of Pepys’s character, which may be removed by argument, if it is anywhere entertained. Pepys is so little reticent about his follies, blunders, and misfortunes that he may create in some minds the impression that he was a booby and a ridiculous person. The “Diary” in truth, with all its particularity and sincerity, is unjust to its author. The reader has to remind himself that it is microscopic, and that to get a just view of Pepys one ought not to know all about him. It may be difficult to understand where there was room for all his work, in the perpetual trade of morning draughts and suppers, plays in the afternoon, and the lute and the theorbo in the evening. But the secret of the “Diary,” if there be a secret in it, is that it was written by an industrious man of business, who did well for himself, and worked honestly for his office.

  Its piquancy is not due to its expression of uncommon emotions, but precisely to the frankness which reveals emotions, all but universal, which most people conceal from themselves, and nearly all men from others. Boswell not only felt but avowed similar weaknesses. Pepys avowed them, though only to himself. He was not a hypocrite in cipher, though no doubt as reserved as his neighbours in longhand. The “unconscious humour” which Lowell attributes to him lies in the coolness of his confession, with which his readers sympathise, though they would not make similar confessions themselves. It seems to be highly improbable that he ever thought of publicity for his diaries, though he may have kept them as materials for an autobiography which was never executed.

  We sympathize with Pepys as we sympathize with Ulysses, and are for the time much more anxious about the liquidation of his tailor’s bill, or the adjustment of his misunderstandings with his wife, than “what the Swede intends or what the French.”… No work of the kind in the world’s literature can for a moment be compared to Pepys’s “Diary.”… The “Diary,” besides, is no less admirable as a delineation of the macrocosm than of the microcosm. It paints the official and private circles in which the author moved, the course of public affairs, the humours of social life, with no less truth and frankness than it reveals the author himself. It is by far the most valuable document extant for the understanding of the times; better than all the histories and all the comedies. It seems an unequalled piece of irony that the supreme piece of workmanship in its way and the most lucid mirror of its age should be the performance of an ordinary citizen who had not the least idea that he was doing anything remarkable; who expected celebrity, if he expected it at all, from his official tasks and scientific recreations; who shrouded his work in shorthand lest the world should profit by it; and who would have been dismayed beyond measure if he had foreseen that it would be published after his death.

  If ever a man was designed to keep a diary, it was Pepys. He is naïve and communicative to a fault. Seated in his own confessional, he unbosoms his memory and absolves his conscience…. This typical bourgeois of his day, fussy and pompous, petty and busybodying, regular in his irregularities as in his expenditure, thrifty, vain, and passionately inquisitive, would retire into his sanctum, produce the treasured pages, and find his relief in the truthful industry of his chronicle. For truth and industry are among his redeeming features.