‘Ein guter Mensch in seinem dunkeln DrangeIst sich des rechten Weges wohl bewusst.’
‘Ein guter Mensch in seinem dunkeln DrangeIst sich des rechten Weges wohl bewusst.’
‘Ein guter Mensch in seinem dunkeln DrangeIst sich des rechten Weges wohl bewusst.’
It is impossible to pass over so unique a work as theDiarywithout 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.’
‘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.’
Thenaïvetéof these passages, and of hundreds more like them, remains unequalled in literature. Novelists, as Le Sage inGil Blasand Thackeray inBarry 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 verylimitations, 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 mostof 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 wayvery 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.’
‘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 mostof 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 wayvery 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 areusually couched in a formal full-dress style, contrasting strongly with the careless ease of theDiary. 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, entitledThe 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 artlessnaïvetéwill 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 uphimself, 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.’
‘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 uphimself, 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 abarrister, 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 apologeticExamen, 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 unreasonof 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 especialrepositories 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 extraordinarygower[Giaour], as well for person as abilities to transact the greatest affairs. The Grand Signor declared that he would see this extraordinarygower: 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.’
‘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 extraordinarygower[Giaour], as well for person as abilities to transact the greatest affairs. The Grand Signor declared that he would see this extraordinarygower: 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 ‘extraordinarygower’ 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.’
‘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.’
Mrs. Hutchinson’sLife of Col. Hutchinson.
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.
Religious Biography: Izaak Walton, 1593-1683.
The most important ecclesiastical biography by a contemporary writer is the life of Archbishop Williams, byBishop 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 ofThe 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 mantlefell 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 theReliquiae 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 theComplete 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 maximnoscitur a sociisis 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’sHistory 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 theEcclesiastical 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.
The Pulpit in the Restoration epoch.
Passing from the biographers of divines to the divines themselves, we observe that, with the signal exception ofPilgrim’s Progress, nearly all the writers in this department whose productions have established a claim to rank among English classics belong to ‘the company of the preachers.’ This is not in itself surprising; preaching stimulates eloquence, and the homilist enjoys a much greater freedom of range, and a fuller exemption from restraint, than the writer upon strictly technical or professional subjects. It does, however, at first sight seem remarkable, that an age so generally decried for immorality as the Restoration should, with the decade immediately preceding, have been the golden age of the English pulpit. In fact, as we have implied when treating of the drama, the apparent licence of the age did not really extend much beyond gay and fashionable circles, which could not greatly affect the pulpit except to its advantage, by furnishing it with impressive topics. Even in these circles immorality was far from necessarily implying irreligion; and the sober citizens who crowded churches and meeting-houses, and the universities, whose routine afforded so many opportunities for the delivery of discourses from the pulpit, were much as heretofore. In the rudimentary condition of the pressas an organ of public information and education, and when the meeting was hardly an institution as yet, the spoken word possessed a power of which the newspaper has since gone far to deprive it. In times of public disquiet, such as the days of the Exclusion Bill or those which preceded the Revolution, churches and chapels were crowded with people seeking guidance, popular sermons went through edition after edition, and popular divines were almost tribunes of the people. Theological considerations moulded political opinion to a degree now hardly conceivable; the storm of pamphlets on both sides called forth by the resipiscence or tergiversation of a leading divine like Sherlock shows what importance attached to his conduct upon either view of it. The age, moreover, was in the stage of literary development most favourable for pulpit eloquence. As a huge glacier takes longer to melt than a small one, the quaint and involved periods of the Elizabethan pulpit stood out longer than ordinary prose against the disintegrating influence of seventeenth century taste, and while the new movement was triumphant in most branches of literature, it in general only affected the style of the sermon so far as to chasten and mellow it, leaving it still that sonorous dignity and that flavour of the antique with which stately and impressive eloquence can rarely dispense. The two greatest preachers, Barrow and South, stand just upon this culminating point of excellence, uniting the majesty of the old style to the ease and clearness of the new. Tillotson, going a step further, and bringing the pulpit down to the level of ordinary educated society, performed indeed a most useful work, but inevitably prepared the way for the sensible but unimpressive preaching of the next century.
Isaac Barrow (1630-1677).
Isaac Barrow, Master of Trinity College, was the son of a respectable tradesman, linendraper to Charles I.His royalist and Arminian opinions kept him back under the Commonwealth, but after the Restoration he was acknowledged as the first mathematician of his country, except, as he was the first to allow, another Isaac whose surname was Newton. Newton, who had been Barrow’s pupil, revised his lectures on optics (1669), an epoch-making work, but composed in Latin, as were his scarcely less celebrated lectures on geometry. His reputation as an English classic rests upon two great theological works, hisTreatise on the Pope’s Supremacy(edited, after his death, by Tillotson) and hisExposition of the Creed, and upon his sermons, which do not seem to have been extremely popular in his own day, though gaining the suffrage of such dissimilar men as Locke and Charles II., who called Barrow ‘an unfair preacher, because he exhausted every topic, and left no room for anything to be said by anyone who came after him.’ It may be reasonably conjectured that when Barrow preached before Charles he did not indulge in the inordinate expansiveness, it was not prolixity, that sometimes drove away his congregation. It is to the king’s honour that his bestowal of the mastership of Trinity upon Barrow was entirely his own act.
Robert South (1633-1716).
Robert South, on the whole perhaps the greatest preacher of his age, was born in 1633, and educated at Westminster and Christ Church. He is accused by Antony Wood, the principal authority for his life, of having been a time-server, who sided successively with the Independents, the Presbyterians, and the Church of England in the days of their power. Wood seems, however, to have had some private grievance against him; and if South was really at the same time so pliant and so able, it seems strange that he should have attained no higher preferment than stalls at Christ Churchand Westminster. Quarrelsome he certainly was, and he entered into a most acrimonious controversy with Sherlock, which it required a royal proclamation to compose. He died in 1716.
John Tillotson (1630-1694).
Unlike South’s, the character of John Tillotson is no matter for controversy. With the possible exception of Archbishop Herring,[11]he was the most amiable man that ever filled the see of Canterbury, and was pronounced by the discerning and experienced William III. the best friend he had ever had and the best man he had ever known. To the meekness of the pastor Tillotson added the qualities of the statesman, and happy was it for the Church of England that such a man could be found to fill the primacy at such a time. As a master of oratory he is greatly inferior in eloquence to both Barrow and South, but historically is more important than either, for Addison was influenced by him, and his discourses long gave the tone to the English pulpit, affording the almost universally accepted model throughout the greater part of the eighteenth century.
Of these three great preachers South is certainly the greatest as respects eloquence and energy of diction. Almost every sentence is striking, and at the same time inperfect good taste. By so much, however, as he surpasses his rivals in purely literary qualities, does he fall below them in others even more essential to the preacher. His judgment is often greatly at fault, he commits himself to plainly untenable propositions, and enforces them with the confidence of one displaying self-evident truths. After a few experiences of this kind the reader begins to look upon him as a rhetorician, and to prefer the more cautious, but still vivid and vigorous ratiocination of Barrow; or the ‘sweet reasonableness’ of Tillotson, inferior to Barrow, as he to South, in the gifts of the consummate orator, but more truly persuasive in the gentleness of his expostulation and his transparent candour.
Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester (1635-1699), though a fine preacher, is less remembered in this capacity than for his unsuccessful controversy with Locke and hisOrigines Sacrae, a work of great learning in defence of the Church of England, which Coleridge in hisNotes on Booksemphatically prefers to the corresponding labours of Chillingworth. Coleridge was naturally prejudiced in favour of the antagonist of Locke, whose graces of mind and person, however, are attested by a dispassionate witness, Pepys.
Theology, apart from eloquence, is hardly entitled to a place in literary history; yet some of the theologians of the period were too illustrious to be passed over without mention. John Pearson, Bishop of Chester (1612-1686), ranks among the Fathers of the Church of England by his standard work on the Creed. ‘Pearson’s very dust,’ says Bentley, ‘is gold.’ Barrow’s great controversial treatise has been mentioned. George Bull, Bishop of St. David’s (1634-1710), achieved even more, for he extorted the thanks of the clergy of France by hisNicaenae Fidei Defensio(1685), written in Latin, but afterwards translatedinto English. The author’s object was to prove the orthodoxy of the Ante-Nicene Fathers, which had been disputed by several Protestant divines; the cost of publication was borne by the munificent Bishop Fell. The French prelates further paid Bull the equivocal compliment of wondering why in the world so excellent a man did not join the Church of Rome.Talis cum sis, utinam noster esses.Bull expounded his difficulties in a treatise on the corruptions of that church, the most popular of his works at home, but which, being written in English, failed to vindicate his position in the eyes of the Frenchmen. Next to these giants of learning may be named a very dissimilar person, Richard Baxter (1615-1691), whom moderate men had designated for a bishopric at the Restoration, but whom the Bartholomew’s Day of 1662 made a Nonconformist. He wrote one hundred and sixty-eight books, two of which have survived,A Call to the UnconvertedandThe Saints’ Everlasting Rest. The latter Professor Minto calls ‘a volume of pious thoughts that have a peculiar interest when we view them as the aspirations of an infirm man turning wearily from the distractions of a time utterly out of joint.’ The writings of George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, mostly belong to a previous period; but theNo Cross, no Crownof William Penn (1644-1718) falls within Restoration literature. A far more important work is theApologyof Robert Barclay (1648-1690). This remarkable book, which has been recommended by bishops to theological students as the best available for many purposes, is the standard exposition of Quakerism, and undoubtedly ranks among the classics of its period. Mr. Leslie Stephen describes it as ‘one of the most impressive theological writings of the century: grave, logical, and often marked by the eloquence of lofty moral convictions.’ ‘The St. Paul of the Quakers,’ says Coleridge of theauthor. Barclay, the descendant of an old Scotch family, became a Quaker in 1667, following the example of his father. He underwent some persecution, but was in the main shielded by the favour of James II. His works were collected by Penn in 1692.
Two devotional writings of the age, besides Baxter’s, obtained sufficient currency to merit a place in the history of literature.The Whole Duty of Man, first published in 1658, is an excellent representative of the sobriety and sound sense characteristic of the Church of England. At the same time it must be confessed that it has more reason than unction, and seeks rather to menace and upbraid than to allure men into the religious life. At the present day it would be pronounced grievously deficient in fervour, servile in its political teachings, and too exclusive in its appeals to prudential and self-interested motives; but its adaptation to a positive and prosaic age was sufficiently evinced by a circulation enormous for the period. The authorship is involved in mystery: it is usually attributed to Archbishop Sterne or Lady Pakington; but Sterne can hardly have had time to write the seven other treatises ascribed, apparently with good ground, to the same author; and it is clearly not the composition of a woman. Evelyn attributes it on the authority of Archbishop Tenison to a Dr. Chaplin, of University College, Oxford, who cannot be traced. Lately Mr. Dobie, in theAcademy, has ascribed it and its companions on strong grounds to Richard Allestree, Provost of Eton, an intimate friend of Bishop Fell. The Bishop appears to have copied some of them in his own hand, and certainly was acquainted with the authorship. The most important of the other works ascribed to the writer ofThe Whole Duty of ManareThe Causes of the Decay of Christian Piety,The Gentleman and Ladies’ Calling, andThe Government of the Tongue.
Another work of edification, which almost rivalled the popularity ofThe Whole Duty of Man, was thePractical Discourse concerning Death(1689), by William Sherlock (1641-1707), Master of the Temple and Dean of St. Paul’s, the divine whose tergiversations respecting the oath of allegiance to William and Mary are so amusingly detailed by Macaulay. It is a model of clear and forcible writing, but on the lowest plane of unspiritual selfishness. ‘How unreasonable is it for us to trouble ourselves about this world longer than we are like to continue in it!’ exclaims Sherlock, with the air of one apologizing for enunciating a truism.