Two private diarists, whose autobiographic records remained unknown to their contemporaries, have justly obtained classic rank by the publication of their records in the nineteenth century. One of these, Samuel Pepys, stands incontestably at the head of the world’s literature in his own department. John Evelyn, possessing neither the humour, the naÏvetÉ, the shrewdness, or the uncompromising frankness of his rival and friend, occupies a much lower place as an autobiographer, though more highly endowed as a scholar and a man of letters. Born in 1620 of a prosperous county family, whose fortune had been made by the manufacture of gunpowder, he found himself an idle young Templar at the outbreak of the Civil War. Three days’ service in the royal army sufficed him, and in 1643 he obtained the king’s permission to travel. This does not seem very heroic conduct, but the family estate, lying at Wotton, near Dorking, was probably in the actual occupation of the Parliamentarians. He remained abroad until 1647, and his notes on art and antiquity are among the most valuable portions of his diary. Study and gardening were his chief occupations under the Commonwealth, varied with some cautious intriguing on behalf of the exiled king. Under the Restoration he was in great favour, and, although taking no part in politics, filled several honourable public offices. A sincere Churchman, he was greatly alarmed by James II.’s illegalities, and acquiesced in the Revolution as a necessary evil. In 1695 he was appointed treasurer to Greenwich Hospital. He died in 1706. The general view of his character is that expressed by Mr. Leslie Stephen, who describes him as ‘the typical instance of the accomplished and public-spirited gentleman of the Restoration.’ The chief dissentient from this favourable estimate is a person of weight, De Quincey, who, in a conversation with Woodhouse, violently attacks Evelyn’s Diary, three years after its publication, as ‘a weak, good-for-nothing little book, much praised by weak people,’ and abuses the author as ‘a shallow, empty, cowardly, vain, assuming coxcomb,’ ‘a mere literary fribble, a fop, and a smatterer affecting natural history and polite learning.’ There is just this much of truth in this splenetic onslaught, that Evelyn was an amateur in authorship, and that his high character and influential friendships no doubt contributed much to the esteem with which the works published in his lifetime were regarded in his day. The Diary stands on a different footing; it appealed to a remote and impartial public, and the appeal has been justified by edition after edition.

Evelyn’s claims to literary distinction rest principally upon his Diary and his Sylva, which will be noticed in another place. The chief literary merits of the Diary are its unassuming simplicity and perfect perspicuity of style and phrase. Infinitely less interesting than Pepys’s, it has the advantage of covering a much more extensive period, and faithfully reflecting the feelings of a loyal, pious, sensible Englishman at various important crises of public affairs. Unlike Pepys, whose estimates of men and things are very fluctuating, Evelyn is consistent, and we may feel sure that any modification of sentiment that may be observed in him faithfully represents the inevitable influence of circumstances upon a man of independent judgment. His personal loyalty to the house of Stuart is manifestly cooled, though not chilled, by the scandals of Charles II.’s reign; but it is not until Church and King come into open conflict in the reign of James II. that Evelyn gives any countenance to a violent change of government, which it is clear he would most willingly have avoided. The extreme caution and moderation of his language lend weight to his disapprobation, and indicate more forcibly than any vigour of declamation how completely James had alienated his true friends. Evelyn’s position was that of one who could neither lift a hand against the Government or stretch one out to defend it. His unaffected style almost rises into poetry as he succinctly enumerates the omens which heralded the downfall of James:

‘October 14. The King’s birthday. No guns from the Tower as usual. The sun eclipsed at its rising. This day signal for the victory of William the Conqueror against Harold, near Battel, in Sussex. The wind, which had been hitherto west, was east all this day. Wonderful expectation of the Dutch fleet. Public prayers ordered to be read in the churches against invasion.’

The interest of the early part of the Diary is of a different kind. It is occupied with the author’s continental travels, and shows what was thought best worth seeing in that age, with many curious incidental traits of manners, and examples of the hardships and perils with which wayfarers were then beset. As always, we have to lament that the traveller was in that day so much of a mere sightseer, and took so little pains to acquaint himself with the moral, intellectual, or industrial life of the nations he visited. This was the universal failing of the age, and of all preceding ages; not until the eighteenth century do we meet with a really philosophical traveller. Evelyn, however, is not insensible to humanity when it is thrust upon his attention; and his study of painting in his youth, and the taste for arboriculture which produced his Sylva, qualify him beyond most of his contemporaries for the description of the aspects of nature. The feeling for nature and the feeling for humanity are well combined in the following passage:

‘We went then to visit the galleys, being about twenty-five in number; the Capitaine of the Galley Royal gave us most courteous entertainment in his cabin, the slaves in the interim playing both loud and soft music very rarely. Then he showed how he commanded their motions with a nod, and his whistle making them row out. The spectacle was to me new and strange, to see so many hundreds of miserably naked persons, their heads being shaven close and having only high red bonnets, a pair of coarse canvass drawers, their whole backs and legs naked, doubly chained about their middle and legs, in couples, and made fast to their seats, and all commanded in a trice by an imperious and cruel seaman. One Turk amongst the rest he much favoured, who waited on him in his cabin, but with no other dress than the rest, and a chain locked about his leg, but not coupled. This galley was richly carved and gilded, and most of the rest were very beautiful. After bestowing something on the slaves, the capitaine sent a band of them to give us music at dinner where we lodged. I was amazed to contemplate how these miserable caitiffs lie in their galley crowded together; yet there was hardly one but had some occupation, by which, as leisure and calms permitted, they got some little money, insomuch as some of them have, after many years cruel servitude, been able to purchase their liberty. The rising-forward and falling-back at their oar, is a miserable spectacle, and the noise of their chains, with the roaring of the beaten waters, has something of strange and fearful in it to one unaccustomed to it. They are ruled and chastised by strokes on their backs and soles of their feet, on the least disorder, and without the least humanity, yet are they cheerful and full of knavery.’

Evelyn’s Diary, however, with all its desert, sinks into insignificance beside the Diary of Samuel Pepys, but the same remark applies to almost every diary in the world. Pepys’s Diary has been frequently compared with Boswell’s Life of Johnson, and with justice in so far as the charm of each arises from the inimitable naÏvetÉ of the author’s self-revelations. Boswell had a much greater character than his own to draw, but Pepys had to be his own Johnson. It is giving him no excessive praise to say that he makes himself as interesting as Johnson and Boswell together. There cannot be a stronger proof of the infinite interest and importance of humanity that when we for once get a fellow-creature to depict himself as he really is, the most trivial details become matters of serious concern. 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.’ The only drawback is that the Pepys in whom we are so deeply interested is, after all, not altogether the true Pepys; not the distinguished civil servant or the intelligent promoter of science; not the man as he appeared to his friends and contemporaries, but an incarnation of whatever was petty, or ludicrous, or self-seeking in a man of no inconsiderable official and intellectual distinction. ‘A very worthy, industrious, and curious person,’ says Evelyn, ‘universally beloved, hospitable, generous, learned in many things, skilled in music, a very great cherisher of learned men, of whom he had the conversation.’ All these traits are abundantly confirmed by passages in the Diary, and yet, so infinitely more vivid is the delineation of the writer’s foibles, that one attempting to draw his character from the Diary would hardly have noticed them.

Pepys’s life is chiefly remarkable for the extraordinary good fortune which raised him from an humble and precarious position to one in which he was enabled to render great service to his country. The son of a London tailor, whose family came from Brampton in Huntingdonshire, he had the good fortune to be distantly related to Sir Edward Montagu, afterwards Earl of Sandwich, one of the chief agents in the Restoration, to whose patronage he owed everything. A sizar and scholar at Cambridge, he married somewhat early and imprudently, accompanied his patron when he went as admiral to the Sound in 1658, and upon his return appears to have filled an inferior clerkship in the Exchequer. The Restoration brought him into the Admiralty, and for long after his history is one of rapid rise and increasing wealth, mainly acquired by means which would now be thought most reprehensible in a civil servant, but which the lax official morality of his day absolved or but faintly condemned. In 1669 the weakness of his eyes compelled him to discontinue his Diary and to solicit leave of absence from official duty on a tour in France and Holland. Shortly after his return he lost his wife, whose leaning to the Roman Catholic religion gave colour to a charge against himself of being a concealed Romanist, the object of which was to invalidate his election to Parliament for Aldborough. These proceedings failed, but in 1679 he was imprisoned for a short time on an accusation of being concerned in the Popish Plot, and, notwithstanding the absurdity of the charge, found it advisable to withdraw for a while from the Admiralty. He was reinstated in 1684, having in the interim made a voyage to Tangier on public business. Under James II., who understood naval affairs and knew the worth of Pepys, he attained to great influence, and the navy to this day is deeply indebted to him for the improvements he introduced into its administration. He lost his employments at the Revolution, and retired to a life of scholarly leisure, dying in 1703. In 1684 he had become President of the Royal Society, of which he had been one of the earliest members, and long after his retirement the members continued to meet at his house.

Pepys bequeathed his library to Magdalen College, Cambridge, where it is preserved in exactly the same condition as he left it. The immortal Diary was among the books, but attracted no notice until about 1811. It was shortly afterwards deciphered by the Rev. J. Smith, and published in 1825 by Lord Braybrooke, who omitted much of the most racy and characteristic part as below the dignity of history. These omissions were principally supplied in the edition of the Rev. Mynors Bright, 1875; and Mr. Henry Wheatley is now publishing an edition absolutely complete, with the exception of some few passages positively unprintable.

No work of the kind in the world’s literature can for a moment be compared to Pepys’s Diary; but many circumstances must combine ere the existence of such a book is possible. It is characteristic of Pepys to be at once a very extraordinary and a very ordinary person. In one point of view he is the most perfect representative imaginable of the bourgeois type of humanity, worthy, sensible, indispensable, and at the same time dull, prosaic, and narrow-minded. Yet this solid citizen has a dash of the Gil Blas in him too; and his little rogueries and servilities appear the more amusing by contrast with the really estimable and respectable background of his character. These qualities combined make a perfect hero of autobiography; his ordinary qualities awaken a fellow-feeling for so characteristic a specimen of average humanity, and his deviations from the straight path communicate the piquancy of comedy, sometimes the exuberance of farce. Extraordinary he is too, for assuredly no one ever recorded his thoughts and actions with such absolute sincerity; or if anyone ever did, his thoughts and actions were not worthy of record. Those of Pepys, somehow, always seem worthy of being perpetuated. However trivial they may sometimes be, they are saved by the writer’s admirable manner, and the contagious earnestness of his conviction that they are in truth of deep concern. The reader, moreover, is continually exercised by the problem whether his author is really aware of the display he is making of himself. If he is, he is a miracle of courage; if not, his obtuseness is equally extraordinary. 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. Many chances have conspired for its preservation; it is wonderful that the writer should not have destroyed it; beyond expectation that he should have bequeathed it to Magdalen College; fortunate, to say the least, that it should have been so well preserved there, and have attracted attention at last. We shall never be able to determine whether we have more reason to be thankful that it was carried on so long, and so fortunately preserved, or to lament that it was not continued throughout the periods of the Popish Plot and the Rye House Plot, of Monmouth’s rising, and of the Revolution.

The Diary extends from January 1st, 1660, to May 31st, 1669, when Pepys writes, ‘And thus ends all that I doubt I shall ever be able to do with my own eyes in the keeping of my journal.’ He recovered his sight, at least to a great extent, but the habit was broken, and never resumed. He had in the interim seen and described the Restoration, the Great Plague, the Great Fire, and the great disaster of 1667, when the Dutch burned the English fleet in the Medway. During this time he had seen continually and been on terms more or less intimate with Charles II., the Duke of York, Monk, Clarendon, Sandwich, Shaftesbury, Sir William Coventry, and a multitude of persons of lower degree of almost every class of society except the Puritans, who are only represented by his worthy predecessor in office, Mr. Blackburne. He has displayed himself to us in almost every possible attitude, attending to accounts, drafting state papers, measuring the timber in the dockyards, giving and taking bribes, defending himself before the House of Commons, alternately a Mercury and a Mentor to his patron, dissipating at the theatre, flirting and something more with actresses and pretty servants, helping to set the Royal Society going, sitting for his portrait, practising music, buying and binding books, a perfect Proteus, yet always the same Pepys, a true type of his age in its peculiar idiosyncrasies, and of human nature in its essential sameness, heroic in no respect, yet admirable in many, and, with many meannesses, by no means despicable, as good an example as can be found of the truth of Goethe’s dictum:

It is impossible to pass over so unique a work as the Diary without extract, yet extracts can only convey the impression of bricks from a building. The following have been selected chiefly with reference to their incomparable quaintness and raciness, the one grace which our literature has forfeited without hope of recovery.

‘July 18, 1660. Thence to my Lord about business, and being in talk in comes one with half a buck from Hinchinbroke, and it smelling a little strong my Lord did give it to me. I did carry it to my mother.

‘July 8, 1661. But, above all, our trouble is to find that his estate appears nothing as we expected, and as all the world believes; nor his papers so well sorted as I would have had them, but all in confusion, that break my brains to understand them. We missed also the surrenders of his copyhold land, without which the land would not come to us, but to the heir-at-law, so that what with this, and the badness of the drink, and the ill opinion I have of the meat, and the biting of the gnats by night, and my disappointment in getting home this week, and the trouble of sorting all the papers, I am almost out of my wits with trouble, only I appear the more contented, because I would not have my father troubled.

‘Feb. 19, 1665. In the evening comes Mr. Andrews, and we sung together, and at supper hearing by accident of my maids their letting in a roguing Scotch woman that haunts the office, to help them to wash and scour in our house, and that very lately, I fell mightily out, and made my wife, to the disturbance of the house and neighbours, to beat our little girl, and then we shut her down into the cellars, and there she lay all night.

‘July 12, 1667. Thence after dinner home, and there find my wife in a dogged humour for my not dining at home, and I did give her a pull by the nose and some ill words, which she provoked me to by something she spoke, that we fell extraordinarily out, insomuch that, I going to the office to avoid further anger, she followed me in a devilish manner thither, and with much ado I got her into the garden out of hearing, to prevent shame, and so home, and by degrees I find it necessary to calm her, and did, and then to the office, where pretty late, and then to walk with her in the garden, and pretty good friends, and so to bed with my mind quiet.

‘Aug. 18, 1667. I walked towards White Hall, but, being weary, turned into St. Dunstan’s Church, where I heard an able sermon of the minister of the place; and stood by a pretty, modest maid, whom I did labour 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 also.

‘Oct. 4, 1667. To see Sir W. Batten. He is asleep, and so I could not see him; but in an hour after word is brought me that he is so ill that it is believed he cannot live till to-morrow, which troubles me and my wife mightily, partly out of kindness, he being a good neighbour, and partly out of the money he owes me, upon our bargain of the late prize.’

The naÏvetÉ of these passages, and of hundreds more like them, remains unequalled in literature. Novelists, as Le Sage in Gil Blas and Thackeray in Barry Lyndon, have striven hard to make their personages paint themselves as they really are, but their art is far excelled by Pepys’s nature. If, as Carlyle deems, speech and hearing were principally bestowed upon us that ‘our brother might impart to us truly how it stands with him in that inner man of his,’ no man has turned the former of these gifts to better account than Pepys. The same sincerity renders him a truthful mirror of public sentiment; and his very limitations, intellectual and moral, enhance the value of his testimony. He has no bias to interfere with the veracity of his delineation; he simply reports what people around him are saying and thinking; he can show us how the stream goes, because he is borne along with it himself. The lively description which we are about to quote of the consternation caused by the Dutch irruption into the Thames in 1667, is an admirable example of his power of reproducing the atmosphere around him:

‘June 13th. No sooner up but hear the sad news confirmed of the Royal Charles being taken by them, and now in fitting by them, which Pett should have carried up higher by our several orders, and deserves, therefore, to be hanged for not doing it, and burning several others; and that another fleet is come up into the Hope. Upon which news the King and Duke of York have been below since four o’clock in the morning, to command the sinking of ships at Barking-Creek, and other places, to stop their coming up higher: which put me into such a fear, that I presently resolved of my father’s and wife’s going into the country; and, at two hours’ warning, they did go by the coach this day, with about £1,300 in gold in their night-bag. Pray God give them good passage, and good care to hide it when they come home! but my heart is full of fear. They gone, I continued in fright and fear what to do with the rest. W. Hewer hath been at the banker’s, and hath got £500 out of Backewell’s hands of his own money; but they are so called upon that they will be all broke, hundreds coming to them for money: and they answer him, “It is payable at twenty days—when the days are out, we will pay you;” and those that are not so, they make tell over their money, and make their bags false, on purpose to give cause to retell it, and so spend time. I cannot have my 200 pieces of gold again for silver, all being bought up last night that were to be had, and sold for 24 and 25/ a-piece. So I must keep the silver by me, which sometimes I think to fling into the house of office, and then again know not how I shall come by it, if we be made to leave the office. Every minute some one or other calls for this or that order; and so I forced to be at the office most of the day about the fire-ships which are to be suddenly fitted out; and it’s a most strange thing that we hear nothing from any of my brethren at Chatham: so that we are wholly in the dark, various being the reports of what is done there; insomuch that I sent Mr. Clapham express thither to see how matters go. I did, about noon, resolve to send Mr. Gibson away after my wife with another 1,000 pieces, under colour of an express to Sir Jeremy Smith; who is, as I hear, with some ships at Newcastle; which I did really send to him, and may, possibly, prove of good use to the King; for it is possible, in the hurry of business, they may not think of it at Court, and the charge of an express is not considerable to the King. The King and Duke of York up and down all the day here and there; sometime on Tower Hill, where the City militia was; where the King did make a speech to them, that they should venture themselves no further than he would himself. I also sent, my mind being in pain, Saunders after my wife and father, to overtake them at their night’s lodging, to see how matters go with them. In the evening, I sent for my cousin Sarah and her husband, who come; and I did deliver them my chest of writings about Brampton, and my brother Tom’s papers, and my journals, which I value much; and did send my two silver flagons to Kate Joyce’s: that so, being scattered what I have, something might be saved. I have also made a girdle, by which, with some trouble, I do carry about me £300 in gold about my body, that I may not be without something in case I should be surprised: for I think, in any nation but our’s, people that appear, for we are not indeed so, so faulty as we, would have their throats cut.’

‘July 14th (Lord’s day). Up, and my wife, a little before four, and to make us ready; and by and by Mrs. Turner come to us, by agreement, and she and I staid talking below, while my wife dressed herself, which vexed me that she was so long about it, keeping us till past five o’clock before she was ready. She ready; and, taking some bottles of wine, and beer, and some cold fowl with us into the coach, we took coach and four horses, which I had provided last night, and so away. A very fine day, and so towards Epsom, talking all the way pleasantly, and particularly of the pride and ignorance of Mrs. Lowther, in having of her train carried up. The country very fine, only the way very dusty. To Epsom, by eight o’clock, to the well; where much company, and I drank the water: they did not, but I did drink four pints. And to the town, to the King’s Head; and hear that my Lord Buckhurst and Nelly are lodged at the next house, and Sir Charles Sedley with them: and keep a merry house. Poor girl! I pity her; but more the loss of her at the King’s house. W. Hewer rode with us, and I left him and the women, and myself walked to church, where few people to what I expected, and none I knew, but all the Houblons, brothers, and them after sermon I did salute, and walk with towards my inn.... Then I carried them to see my cousin Pepys’s house, and ‘light, and walked round about it, and they like it, as indeed it deserves, very well, and is a pretty place; and then I walked them to the wood hard by, and there got them in the thickets till they had lost themselves, and I could not find the way into any of the walks in the wood, which indeed are very pleasant, if I could have found them. At last got out of the wood again; and I, by leaping down the little bank, coming out of the wood, did sprain my right foot, which brought me great present pain, but presently, with walking, it went away for the present, and so the women and W. Hewer and I walked upon the Downs, where a flock of sheep was; and the most pleasant and innocent sight that ever I saw in my life. We found a shepherd and his little boy reading, far from any houses or sight of people, the Bible to him; so I made the boy read to me, which he did, with the forced tone that children do usually read, that was mighty pretty, and then I did give him something, and went to the father, and talked with him; and I find he had been a servant in my cousin Pepys’s house, and told me what was become of their old servants. He did content himself mightily in my liking his boy’s reading, and did bless God for him, the most like one of the old patriarchs that ever I saw in my life, and it brought those thoughts of the old age of the world in my mind for two or three days after. We took notice of his woollen knit stockings of two colours mixed, and of his shoes shod with iron, both at the toe and heels, and with great nails in the soles of his feet, which was mighty pretty: and, taking notice of them, why, says the poor man, the downs, you see, are full of stones, and we are fain to shoe ourselves thus; and these, says he, will make the stones fly till they ring before me. I did give the poor man something, for which he was mighty thankful, and I tried to cast stones with his horn crook. He values his dog mightily, that would turn a sheep any way which he would have him, when he goes to fold them: told me there was about eighteen score sheep in his flock, and that he hath four shillings a week the year round for keeping of them: and Mrs. Turner, in the common fields here, did gather one of the prettiest nosegays that ever I saw in my life. So to our coach, and through Mr. Minnes’s wood, and looked upon Mr. Evelyn’s house; and so over the common, and through Epsom town to our inn, in the way stopping a poor woman with her milk-pail, and in one of my gilt tumblers did drink our bellyfuls of milk, better than any cream; and so to our inn, and there had a dish of cream, but it was sour, and so had no pleasure in it; and so paid our reckoning, and took coach, it being about seven at night, and passed and saw the people walking with their wives and children to take the air, and we set out for home, the sun by and by going down, and we in the cool of the evening all the way with much pleasure home, talking and pleasing ourselves with the pleasure of this day’s work. Mrs. Turner mightily pleased with my resolution, which, I tell her, is never to keep a country-house, but to keep a coach, and with my wife on the Saturday to go sometimes for a day to this place, and then quit to another place; and there is more variety and as little charge, and no trouble, as there is in a country-house. Anon it grew dark, and we had the pleasure to see several glow-worms, which was mighty pretty, but my foot begins more and more to pain me, which Mrs. Turner, by keeping her warm hand upon it, did much ease; but so that when we come home, which was just at eleven at night, I was not able to walk from the lane’s end to my house without being helped. So to bed, and there had a cere-cloth laid to my feet, but in great pain all night long.’

Pepys’s correspondence forms a useful adjunct to his diary. Some of the letters addressed to him are very entertaining, especially that from Sir Samuel Morland on his matrimonial misadventures. His own letters are usually couched in a formal full-dress style, contrasting strongly with the careless ease of the Diary. Numerous letters and other documents from Pepys’s pen on Admiralty affairs are extant in various repositories, and should be collected and published. He is also the author of an anonymous work on the deposition of Alphonso VI. of Portugal, entitled The Portugal History, or a Relation of the Troubles that happened in the Court of Portugal in the years 1667 and 1668 (published in 1677), which deserves more notice than it has received. It is a curious history of a palace revolution, which must have been written to order by the help of official documents, and is the more remarkable from the close family connection of the Portuguese and English Courts, which latter must have approved, if it did not instigate the publication.

Much space has here been given to Pepys, and not unreasonably, for his will be to all ages the classical model of the diary, and a model to which not only no one ever will attain, but to which no one will endeavour to attain. Such transparent candour and artless naÏvetÉ will hardly in any future age of the world be found united to his parts and knowledge. He is as supreme in his own sphere as Milton in his; and another Milton is more likely to appear than another Pepys.

Another diarist, who, though far inferior to Pepys, deserves to be named along with him, is Sir John Reresby (1634-89), a Yorkshire baronet, of Thrybergh Hall, in the West Riding, a person of great influence by his standing and property in the county. His objects in writing, he informs us, were ‘to instruct posterity how long it has pleased Providence to continue us Reresbys in the same name and place; to save the labour of turning over a great many obscure papers; and to preserve memorials of some things of use as well as of curiosity.’ This seems like the prelude to a family history; the really important part of the book, however, is not the introductory sketch of Reresby’s ancestors, but a diary with very wide gaps devoted in the main to setting forth the writer’s relations with the Court and his neighbours. To the latter he is the grand seigneur; towards the former his attitude is not unlike that of Pepys; he aims to provide as well for himself as possible without dipping too deeply into corruption or absolutely selling himself to promote the designs of arbitrary power. He attaches himself to Danby, whose leading maxim was to build upon the support of the country gentry; successively follows him and Halifax with some misgivings; and, though a devoted servant of James II., his enumeration of that monarch’s tyrannical acts is so honest, that, if every document of the age had perished except his diary, enough might be deduced from this to justify the Revolution. At this time he was Governor of York, where he was surprised and imprisoned; and death overtook him shortly afterwards hesitating between the old king and the new. His memoirs, imperfectly published in 1734, were edited from the original MS. by Mr. Cartwright in 1875.

Rich as the age was in the diaries of private men and memoirs of public transactions, it did not produce many narratives of private lives in strictly autobiographic form. The most important was that of William Lilly the astrologer, whose character of Charles I. has been already noticed. If, as most think, an astrologer must be either a fool or a knave, there can be no doubt under which class to range this entertaining author. Born (1601) at Diseworth in Leicestershire, ‘a town of great rudeness,’ he was indebted for his grammar-school education to his father’s decayed estate, which made the farm not worth following, and for his transfer to London to his total unfitness for all agricultural work. He walked up to London by the side of the carrier’s waggon, got a place in London as general servant, where ‘I saw and ate good white bread, contrary to our diet in Leicestershire;’ but, on the other hand, ‘sometimes helped to carry eighteen tubs of water from the Thames in one morning.’ Within a few years he made his fortune by marrying his master’s widow, and devoted himself for the rest of his life to mathematical and astrological pursuits. He died, in good circumstances, in 1681, and was honourably interred at the expense of Elias Ashmole, to whom his autobiography is addressed. His numerous astrological writings do not concern us here; his memoirs are no less valuable than entertaining for the glimpses they afford into bygone manners and contemporary feeling on public affairs, and particularly for the lively portrayal of the singular characters with whom Lilly was professionally brought into connection, prototypes of the spiritualistic mediums of a later day, and not unfairly represented by William Hodges, ‘whose angels were Raphael, Gabriel, and Uriel; his life answered not in holiness and sanctity to what it should, having to deal with those holy angels.’ The following description of a Welsh conjuror is a characteristic example of Lilly’s graphic touch:

‘It happened on one Sunday 1632, as myself and a Justice of Peace’s clerk were, before service, discoursing of many things, he chanced to say, that such a person was a great scholar, nay, so learned, that he could make an almanack, which to me then was strange: One speech begot another, till, at last, he said, he could bring me acquainted with one Evans in Gun-Powder-Alley, who had formerly lived in Staffordshire, that was an excellent wise man, and studied the black art. The same week after we went to see Mr. Evans. When we come to his house, he having been drunk the night before, was upon his bed, if it be lawful to call that a bed whereon he then lay; he roused up himself, and, after some compliments, he was content to instruct me in astrology. I attended his best opportunities for seven or eight weeks, in which time I could set a figure perfectly: Books he had not any, except Haly de judiciis Astrorum, and Origanus’s Ephemerides; so that as often as I entered his house, I thought I was in the Wilderness. Now something of the man: He was by birth a Welshman, a Master of Arts, and in sacred orders; he had formerly had a cure of souls in Staffordshire, but now was come to try his fortunes at London, being in a manner enforced to fly for some offences very scandalous committed by him in these parts where he had lately lived; for he gave judgment upon things lost, the only shame of astrology: He was the most saturnine person my eyes ever beheld, either before I practised or since; of a middle stature, broad forehead, beetle-browed, thick shoulders, flat-nosed, full lips, down-looked, black curling stiff hair, splay-footed; to give him his right, he had the most piercing judgment naturally upon a figure of theft, and many other questions, that I ever met withal; yet for money he would willingly give contrary judgments, was much addicted to debauchery, and then very abusive and quarrelsome, seldom without a black eye, or one mischief or other: This is the same Evans who made so many antimonial cups, upon the sale whereof he principally subsisted; he understood Latin very well, the Greek tongue not at all: He had some arts above, and beyond astrology, for he was well versed in the nature of spirits, and had many times used the circular way of invocating, as in the time of our familiarity he told me.’

Considering the fertility of the age in personal memoirs, its barrenness in biography is remarkable. Apart from the lives by Mrs. Hutchinson and Izaak Walton, to be noticed presently, and a few brief accounts of celebrated men prefixed to their writings, almost the only example is the cluster of valuable and entertaining family histories for which we are indebted to Roger North (1653-1734), and one of these is an autobiography. Roger North, brother of Francis, Lord Guilford, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas and Jeffreys’s predecessor in the Great Seal, was a barrister, and a man of sound, though hardly shining parts, who owed his extensive practice at the bar to the influence of his relative. It fell off under the malevolent discouragement of Jeffreys, and, at the Revolution, Roger, unable to take the oaths to the new government, retired to his country estate in Norfolk, where he spent a vigorous old age in gardening, building, vindicating the memory of his brothers, writing his own biography, and ‘cheerfully communicating to all, without fee or reward, his great knowledge of the law’—virtuous behaviour, but unprofessional. Two of the Norths were men of unusual ability, the Lord Keeper and Sir Dudley, the eminent Turkey merchant, who returned from a prosperous career at Constantinople to pack juries, as his enemies alleged, in the storms of the Exclusion Bill agitation, and to signalize himself as an authority on questions of trade and finance. The Norths, a jovial race, full of sap and substance, were staunch Cavaliers, and Roger’s biographies of his brothers grew out of a vindication of the Lord Keeper against the attacks of Bishop White Kennett. His apologetic Examen, not published until after his death, though important for the history of the time, can hardly rank as literature. The biographies and autobiography, on the other hand, are very good literature, though Dr. Jessopp is hardly warranted in styling them English classics. They are neither planned with classic symmetry nor executed with classic elegance; but are charming from their artless loquacity and the atmosphere of fraternal affection in which they are steeped, as well as most entertaining from their wealth of anecdote and their portraits, partial, but not intentionally unfair, of remarkable men. Two elements in these books are sharply contrasted, the political and the anecdotic. The former affords a melancholy but useful representation of the factious unreason of political parties in that age, especially Roger’s, and of the prejudices which kept Englishmen apart until they learned toleration from Locke and Hoadly. It is to Roger’s credit that, although he had done his best to put it into James II.’s power to overthrow the Church and trample on the laws, he recoiled when the crisis came. A page or two after expressing his opinion that good citizens never resist arbitrary power, he is found inconsistently, though very rightly, lauding his brother Dudley for refusing, under the strongest pressure from James, to mortgage his vote in Parliament; and the whole tenor of his memoirs shows that, although his principles would not allow him to acquiesce openly in the Revolution, he was at the bottom of his heart by no means sorry for it. His antipathy to Jeffreys, who had enacted towards his brother the part which Laud had formerly performed towards Abbot, may have had something to do with this attitude. His portraits of eminent lawyers, such as Hale, Saunders, and Maynard, though sometimes disfigured by party feeling, have signal value. The anecdotic part of the memoirs, on the other hand, is delightful reading, being full of good-natured fun, shrewd observation, and interesting glimpses of the manners of the times, sometimes well worth noting, as, for example, this testimony to the popularity of the Church of England in Wales in Charles II.’s time: ‘I remember the doctor’ (Roger’s brother John, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge) ‘told us that when he came to his parish, he found the humour of the people very different from what, on like occasions, was often found in England. For, instead of grumbling at and affronting a new tithe-monger came down amongst them, too often known in English villages, the parishioners came about him and hugged him, calling him their pastor, and telling him they were his sheep.’ There are two especial repositories of anecdotes in North’s volumes, that of stories of circuits and eminent lawyers in his memoir of the Lord Keeper and his own autobiography, and the Turkish and Levantine sketches in the life of his brother Dudley. The latter gives a most curious picture of the relations of Mussulmans and Christians in the days when this was the fashion in which unbelievers were noticed by sultans:

‘The great officers about the Grand Signor, with whom he [Dudley North] had transacted and familiarly conversed, told his majesty that there was now in the city of Constantinople an extraordinary gower [Giaour], as well for person as abilities to transact the greatest affairs. The Grand Signor declared that he would see this extraordinary gower: and accordingly the merchant was told of it; and at the time appointed an officer conducted him into the seraglio, and carried him about till he came to a little garden, and there two other men took him by the two arms and led him to a place where he saw the Grand Signor sitting against a large window open in a chamber not very high from the ground; the men that were his conductors, holding each an arm, put their hands upon his neck and bowed him down till his forehead touched the ground; and this was done more than once, and is the very same forced obeisance of ambassadors at their audiences. After this he stood bolt upright as long as the Grand Signor thought fit to look at him; and then, upon a sign given, he was taken away and set free again by himself to reflect on this his romantic audience.’

This ‘extraordinary gower’ appears to have been the perfect ideal of an orientalized John Bull. Having, as his brother assures us, ‘an uncommon disposition to truth,’ it is surprising to find him actively concerned in the subornation of perjury in Turkish law-courts, but this Roger considers a demonstration of the strength of his mind:

‘One must have a strong power of thought to abstract the prejudices of our domestic education and plant ourselves in a way of negotiating in heathen remote countries.’

Another biography of the time unknown to the age which produced it, but a standard work and general favourite since its republication early in the nineteenth century, is the life of Colonel Hutchinson, by his widow. Lucy Hutchinson, third daughter of Sir Allen Apsley, Governor of the Tower, was born in 1620, and in 1638 married Colonel John Hutchinson, of a good Nottinghamshire family, who, after having taken an active part on the parliamentary side during the Civil War, acted as one of the king’s judges, and retired into private life rather than accept employment under Cromwell. He escaped prosecution at the Restoration, but afterwards, upon suspicion of engaging in plots, was imprisoned in Deal Castle, where he died from the unwholesomeness of his quarters. His widow wrote his life between 1664 and 1670, but it was not published until 1806. It is naturally an unqualified panegyric upon her husband, redeemed from insipidity by the conjugal affection and devotion which inspire it, and the elegant simplicity of the style. In panegyrizing her husband, Mrs. Hutchinson unwittingly extols herself; she has no doubt that he was among the wisest as well as the best men of his time, and her simple conviction is so touching, that the reader is almost persuaded to think so too. One of the most high-minded he certainly was, but his independence verged upon impracticability. The strictly historical value of the work is small, except as regards incidents of the Civil War in Nottinghamshire. Mrs. Hutchinson was a highly accomplished woman, and made a metrical translation of Lucretius, which is extant in MS. in the British Museum. The time of her death is not known.

The most important ecclesiastical biography by a contemporary writer is the life of Archbishop Williams, by Bishop Hacket (1592-1670), the munificent restorer of Lichfield Cathedral, which, although first published in 1693, was completed in 1657, and will be more fitly noticed under the pre-Restoration period. This, though more intrinsically valuable, is much less known than a series of little religious biographies which owe their fame partly to the superior attractiveness of the characters depicted, partly to their more manageable compass, and partly to the charm of a tender and pious spirit, rather than of style. Singularly enough, the author owes a still larger measure of fame to another book composed in a similar spirit, but on a subject at first sight (were it not for the profession of St. Peter) wide as the poles asunder from ecclesiastical biography. Izaak Walton, biographer of Donne, and author of The Complete Angler, was born at Stafford in 1593, and died at Winchester in 1683. He appears to have settled in London as a draper about 1616, in a little shop over the Exchange, ‘seven feet long and five feet wide.’ In 1624 he was established in Fleet Street, near the south-west corner of Chancery Lane. In 1643, having secured a competency by trade, and probably finding that his churchmanship and royalism exposed him to annoyance in London, he gave up business and withdrew into the country, living, Wood says, ‘mostly in the families of the eminent clergymen of England,’ unquiet habitations in those times, one would imagine. He had, during his residence in London, greatly ingratiated himself with the dignified clergy, and distinguished himself as the biographer of one of the most eminent among them, though this seems to have been a mere accident, Sir Henry Wotton having requested him to collect materials for a life of Donne, which he intended to have written himself. Wotton dying without having performed his purpose, his mantle fell upon Walton, whose memoir, prefixed to an edition of Donne’s sermons, published in 1640, obtained so much success that he was requested to write the life of Wotton himself. This was completed in 1644, and appeared in 1651 along with the Reliquiae Wottonianae, a collection edited by Walton. The lives of Hooker and Herbert (the former a commission from Archbishop Sheldon) were written shortly after the Restoration, under the roof of Morley, Bishop of Winchester; the life of Bishop Sanderson was written as late as 1675. Meanwhile the Complete Angler, or Contemplative Man’s Recreation, the book on which Walton’s fame after all principally rests, had appeared in 1653, with copies of complimentary verse prefixed which seem to prove that it was ready for the press in 1650. One of these effusions, by Thomas Weaver, dated 1649, is a poem of unusual merit, much in the style of Marvell. Walton, who had married a sister of Bishop Ken, died in the house of his son-in-law, Prebendary Hawkins of Winchester, in 1683. His will, which he had himself drawn up a short time previously, shows the undiminished vigour of his faculties, and the endurance of his connection with his native county. His character may be read in every page of his writings, and is such as to prove that with him angling was indeed the recreation of a contemplative man.

The maxim noscitur a sociis is entirely in Walton’s favour, for his ecclesiastical heroes are the flower of the Church of England of his day. His treatment is in general very satisfactory, entirely sympathetic, the first qualification of biography, and much less marred by prejudice and party spirit than was to have been expected from the agitated character of the times. The simple unaffected style almost verges upon garrulity. Though not a scholar, Walton seems to have possessed sufficient acquaintance with theology to avoid misrepresentation of eminent divines; while the chief value of his work consists in its portrayal of almost ideal charity, meekness, and learning; and in the curious anecdotes embedded in it, such as Pope Clement VIII.’s high appreciation of Hooker, James I.’s influence upon the composition of Sarpi’s History of the Council of Trent, Charles I.’s translation of Sanderson (unfortunately lost), and his infatuated regret expressed to the same divine for having consented to the abolition of episcopacy in Scotland. Walton, into whose composition mirth entered, but not humour, records this with the same gravity with which he chronicles Charles’s injunction to the Merry Monarch to be above all things diligent in the study of Richard Hooker. Some light may possibly be thrown upon the vexed question of the interpolation of the last three books of the Ecclesiastical Polity, by the statement of Hoole, a contemporary schoolmaster, when exhorting his scholars to good penmanship, that many of Hooker’s sermons had been destroyed after his death from the impossibility of deciphering his handwriting.