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From The Edinburgh Review.

195

entire diary fully to appreciate Pepys's industry and diligence," and it is difficult to avoid the thought that the opportunity

The

BRIGHT'S EDITION OF PEPYS'S DIARY.* For nearly sixty years the diary of Samuel Pepys has been a household of so appreciating these, his good quali ties, might have been offered to us. excised passages would not, we imagine, have added sensibly to the bulk of a work in six stout octavo volumes, and might as easily as others have been skipped by those readers to whom they threatened to prove "tedious." With these exceptions, the extent of which is fairly stated, the present edition is, we understand, a complete and careful transcript of the original. It is well and carefully printed on good paper, and is, altogether, a valuable contribution to every English library.

word in English literature; it may, therefore, seem almost paradoxical to say that we now read it for the first time. And yet this is the simple truth, for we have now, what we have never had before, the correct and complete text: correct, for the old and long-received version was full of strange blunders of carelessness or misapprehension; complete, for the former editor, doubting in the first instance as to the value the public might set upon his labors, printed but a scanty abridgment, and even in the second suppressed a large proportion of matter, which he described as "devoid of the slightest interest." We have now an opportunity of criticising his judgment in this respect; for of the present edition no less than one-fourth of the bulk is published for the first time, and is, we conceive, not a whit inferior to the rest, as illustrating the history or domestic life of the period, and the vanities, peccadilloes, or humors of the journalist.

If Mr. Mynors Bright had done nothing more than induce us to read once again the "Diary," even as we have long known it, we should still owe him a debt of gratitude. But he has, in fact, done very much more than this: he has given us the "Diary" as it was written, with the omission of but a few passages described, in the interests of decency, as "unfit for publication," ," and others, "the account of his daily work at the office," which "would have been tedious to the reader."

With respect to the first class of suppressed passages, the editor has doubtless exercised a wise discretion; but we do not feel quite so sure as to the second. "It is impossible," he tells | us, "for any one who has not read the

From this commendation we must, however, bar the illustrations, which are terrible. It is difficult to conceive why editor and publisher should have agreed to disfigure an otherwise handsome set of books by the hideous monstrosities described on the title-page as "portraits printed in permanent Woodbury-type." So much the worse if the announcement is strictly true. They are bad enough now; if permanent, they are bad to all future ages. Those of the court "beauties" are the worst; and if the ghosts of the Duchess of Richmond, Lady Castlemaine, and "pretty witty Nell" do not have their revenge, there is no law of libel on the other side of the Styx. The fact is that the photographer, in the pride of his special art, has paid more attention to the exact reproduction of details than to the general effect, and has focussed the pictures to be copied with such exactness that the light and shade from the lines of the canvas or the irregularities of the paper are even more distinctly shown than the work of the painter or engraver. The result, however admirable from the photographer's point of view, is detestable from that of the artist or the public.

There is still one other exception which, although unwillingly, we feel in duty bound to take to this new and really val uable edition, and that is the way in which it has been annotated. A difficulty about the copyright in Lord Braybrooke's

notes was not overcome till the third | even if he did not know that the civil busivolume was passing through the press. ness of the navy was removed in 1869 The earlier volumes were thus, for the most part, left to the editor's solicitude, which proved unequal to the task; and the new notes are generally needless, frequently incorrect, and occasionally even silly. We may leave our readers to decide to which of these categories they would allot such notes as-"Barbers' shops were anciently places of great resort; ' "Wassel or wassail, from two Saxon words meaning 'water of health; '

from Somerset House to a cluster of typhoidal dens in Spring Gardens. Such also are notices of the "present Westminster Bridge, now shortly to be destroyed,” (vi. 209); of Searle's boathouse, opposite the Houses of Parliament (vi. 210); or of the "present splendor " of the Naval Hospital at Greenwich. He was evidently not aware that the Naval Hospital at Greenwich has no present existence, or that the building, after standing Query, whether from Scull, the water- empty for some years, was converted in man, is derived our word 'sculls,' well 1873 into a college for the higher educaknown to boating men?" But we really tion of naval officers. We mention these must enter a protest against such as this: shortcomings unwillingly, because we un"We read in the diary, May, 1668: derstand that they are chiefly to be attrib'Walked to Magdalene College, and uted to the editor's failing health, which there into the butterys, as a stranger, and permitted him indeed to while away tedithere drank my bellyfull of their beer, ous hours in transcribing the text, but which pleased me as the best I ever rendered him unequal to the research drank.' I should be glad, if I could, to which the annotating or correcting would have a gossip with him, and hear" have demanded. And after all, though what? The raciest scandal of the pleas- we could gladly have spared blemishes ure-loving court? some of Sir John such as these we have pointed out, we Minnes' stories of the old navy? or where still welcome Mr. Bright's edition of he had hidden the MS. of Evelyn's "His- Pepys's "Diary" as the best, or indeed tory of the Dutch War"? No, only the only one which has yet been pub"his opinion of the beer now." Can the proverbial bathos of the commentator sink lower? In the later volumes, when an arrangement had been made to reproduce Lord Braybrooke's notes, they are printed as they were written five-andtwenty or thirty years ago, without the corrections which occasional slips or the lapse of time rendered necessary. Such, for instance, as to Evelyn's mention of the Earl of Nottingham, lord high admiral (vi. 170), the note "Daniel Finch, second Earl of Nottingham," a man who never was lord high admiral; the reference being clearly to the illustrious Howard of Effingham, of whom indeed a most ghastly portrait is given: or again (i. 157), where we are told that the site of the old navy office in Crutchedfriars is now "occupied by the East India Company's ware houses," and by implication that the business of the navy is carried on at Somerset House. We should have thought no | lis, Vincent, Sloane, Dryden, and others, Englishman could be ignorant of the demise of the East India Company in 1858,

lished.

On May 26, 1703, died at Clapham, in his seventy-first year, Mr. Samuel Pepys, a respectable and highly respected old gentleman, who, during the later years of Charles II., and throughout the reign of James, had been secretary to the Admiralty as represented by the king in person. His supposed adhesion to the cause of his old master had got him into trouble at the Revolution; but that had cleared away, and, though for some years an object of suspicion to the new government, he had been on the whole undisturbed, and had passed his old age in the quiet of literary or philosophical leisure. He had been, almost from the beginning, a fellow of the Royal Society; its president in 1684; and had continued to the last a close attendant on its meetings, a friend and correspondent of Sir Isaac Newton, John Evelyn, Edmund Gibson, Dr. Wal

the leading men in the world of literature or science. He was thus, in that world,

E

well and favorably known; although in this was much enlarged for a third edition
science his acquirements were in no re-in 1848, and revised and corrected for a
spect more than those of an intelligent fourth in 1854, of which all later editions,
and cultivated mind, and in literature he till now, have been a reprint. Mr. Bright
had never sought personal distinction; tells us that he undertook to decipher the
his only claim indeed to the title of author MS. afresh, as an amusement during a
being a small volume little more than a sick holiday; and that, in doing this, he
pamphlet on the state of the Royal acted quite independently of Mr. Smith's
Navy, which he had published in 1690, or previous labors, having learned the very
perhaps also another in 1677, on the cipher from a book in the Pepysian Li-
recent history of Portugal, which has been brary, entitled "Tachygraphy, or short
attributed to him. But so far as his writing, the most easie, exact and
means permitted he was a liberal friend to speedie." This once mastered, the work
both, and especially as a collector of was straightforward enough; difficulties
books, the binding and arranging of arose here and there when the writer had
which had long been his pet hobby. wished to keep anything particularly con-
These, on his death, were bequeathed to cealed, in which cases he wrote the
Magdalene College, Cambridge, of which cipher in French, Latin, Greek, or Span-
a member, and with which, ish, or with a number of dummy letters;
through life, he had kept up an occasional but of the passages so disguised, all were
intercourse; by the terms of the will they found unfit for publication.
were to be kept distinct; and they still,
in their original presses, occupy a room
in the master's house, where they are
known as the Pepysian Library.

he was

It does not appear whether, before the master of Magdalene and Lord Grenville took the matter in hand, there was any clear idea of the nature of the MS.; but Now amongst these books were six vol- however this may have been, it at once, umes, closely written in a fine, small, un- in the hands of the decipherer, stood reknown character, which however, in 1818, vealed as a curiously detailed journal of was examined by Lord Grenville, at the nearly ten years of Mr. Pepys's private request of his nephew, the Hon. and Rev. and public life, 1660-69, containing matter George Neville, lately elected master of of exceptional interest, as referring to a Magdalene, when it was at once recog- period of our national existence which did nized as a shorthand, not very different then, and even now still does, exercise a from what Lord Grenville had himself sort of romantic fascination over the used as a student. He therefore recom- minds of all but the most realistic stumended his nephew to find out some man dents of history. During these ten years who, "for the lucre of gain, would sacri- Mr. Pepys was living in London, holding fice a few months to the labor of making an official position at the Admiralty, in a transcript of the whole; for which pur- daily communication with the chief men pose," he added, "I would furnish you of the time-the king, the Duke of York, with my alphabet and lists of arbitrary Monk, Mountagu, Clarendon, Coventry; signs, and also with the transcript of the and, apart from his office, leading a social first three or four pages." Mr. Neville and even festive life, eating, drinking and decided to follow this recommendation, repenting, dancing, theatre-going, and and engaged the assistance of Mr. Smith, generally enjoying the world whilst he was then an undergraduate of St. John's; to young. In reading the "Diary" now as whom, however, the deciphering proved a a whole, it is especially interesting to note very serious task, occupying him for the gradual change of the young and very nearly three years, usually for twelve or poor man of twenty-six into the cheery, fourteen hours a day. The transcript so well-to-do man of ten years older, and the made for Mr. Neville was, by him, handed development of his character from the over to his elder brother, Lord Bray- mean hanger-on of his patron to the resobrooke, who published a selection from it lute and far-seeing official. Throughout in 1825, and a second edition in 1828; this period, every detail of his life, as he