The Age of Dryden Part 14

Burnet's _History of his Own Times_ actually deserves the character which Clarendon incorrectly gives of his own; it is rather the material for history than history itself. This is not a consequence of crude treatment, for all is well arranged and lively, nor from the enc.u.mbrance of original doc.u.ments, of which it is nearly dest.i.tute. It arises rather from the predominance of the autobiographic tone, much more marked than in Clarendon, though Clarendon also relates as an eyewitness, which almost brings the book down to the level of personal memoirs. It must nevertheless be cla.s.sed with histories, and, if not one of the most dignified, it is undoubtedly one of the most entertaining. Burnet's deep interest in the events in which he had taken so large a share insures vivacious and effective treatment; his personages breathe and move, and impress themselves indelibly upon the reader's imagination, though he usually abstains from set efforts at the depicting of character. The defects of his method are no less apparent; in relating what he has not himself heard or seen, he relies upon hearsay, and sinks into a gossip.

The extent, nevertheless, to which he speaks as an eyewitness, renders his work very valuable. Well acquainted with Charles and James, admitted to the favour of William and the full confidence of Mary, he is able to introduce us into their presence, and summon them as it were from the dead. His point of view, being so largely personal, is inevitably partial; he can tell us, for example, of the defects in Shaftesbury's character, which he discovered from actual acquaintance, but nothing of the surprising enlightenment of the statesman, which could only be learned from speeches which he never heard and doc.u.ments which he never saw. Impartiality is the last virtue to be expected from a busy actor in a troubled age, but Burnet approaches it as nearly as can with any reason be demanded. It is hardly in human nature that he should be entirely fair to adversaries by whom he had himself been maligned, but his intention of being so is very apparent. The most impartial and generally the most valuable portion of his work is his narrative up to the Revolution. When he wrote this, animosities had become mellowed by time; when he lived it his contact with affairs had been more intimate as the political agent than afterwards as the spiritual peer.

Disappointment with the course of events colours his account of Anne's reign, and renders him splenetic and querulous. His perspicuous and animated diction does not always attain the dignity of history; he hardly ever attempts eloquence, except in the n.o.ble and deeply-felt conclusion of his work, a portion of which must be cited, although it is no fair example of his ordinary style:

'So that by religion I mean, such a sense of divine truth as enters into a man, and becomes a spring of a new nature within him; reforming his thoughts and designs, purifying his heart, and sanctifying him, and governing his whole deportment, his words as well as his actions; convincing him that it is not enough, not to be scandalously vicious, or to be innocent in his conversation, but that he must be entirely, uniformly, and constantly, pure and virtuous, animating him with a zeal to be still better and better, more eminently good and exemplary, using prayers and all outward devotions, as solemn acts testifying what he is inwardly and at heart, and as methods inst.i.tuted by G.o.d, to be still advancing in the use of them further and further into a more refined and spiritual sense of divine matters. This is true religion, which is the perfection of human nature, and the joy and delight of every one that feels it active and strong within him: it is true, this is not arrived at all at once; and it will have an unhappy alloy, hanging long even about a good man; but, as those ill mixtures are the perpetual grief of his soul, so it is his chief care to watch over and to mortify them; he will be in a continual progress, still gaining ground upon himself; and as he attains to a good degree of purity, he will find a n.o.ble flame of life and joy growing upon him. Of this I write with the more concern and emotion, because I have felt this the true, and indeed the only joy which runs through a man's heart and life: it is that which has been for many years my greatest support; I rejoice daily in it: I feel from it the earnest of that supreme joy which I pant and long for; I am sure there is nothing else can afford any true or complete happiness. I have, considering my sphere, seen a great deal of all that is most s.h.i.+ning and tempting in this world: the pleasures of sense I did soon nauseate; intrigues of state, and the conduct of affairs, have something in them that is most specious; and I was for some years, deeply immersed in these, but still with hopes of reforming the world, and of making mankind wiser and better: but I have found that which is crooked cannot be made straight.

I acquainted myself with knowledge and learning, and that in a great variety, and with more compa.s.s than depth: but though wisdom excelleth folly as much as light does darkness, yet as it is a sore travail, so it is so very defective, that what is wanting to complete it cannot be numbered. I have seen that two were better than one, and that a threefold cord is not easily loosed; and have therefore cultivated friends.h.i.+p with much zeal and a disinterested tenderness; but I have found this was also vanity and vexation of spirit, though it be of the best and n.o.blest sort. So that, upon great and long experience, I could enlarge on the preacher's text, "Vanity of vanities, and all is vanity," but I must also conclude with him; Fear G.o.d, and keep his commandments, for this is the all of man, the whole, both of his duty and of his happiness. I do therefore end all in the words of David, of the truth of which, upon great experience and a long observation, I am so fully a.s.sured, that I leave these as my last words to posterity: "Come, ye children, hearken unto me: I will teach you the fear of the Lord. What man is he that desireth life, and loveth many days, that he may see good? Keep thy tongue from evil, and thy lips from speaking guile. Depart from evil, and do good; seek peace, and pursue it. The eyes of the Lord are upon the righteous, and his ears are open to their cry; but the face of the Lord is against them that do evil, to cut off the remembrance of them from the earth. The righteous cry, and the Lord heareth and delivereth them out of all their troubles. The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit."'

Burnet's reputation as an historian also rests in considerable measure upon another important work, his _History of the Reformation in England_, published in 1679. This great subject, frequently, variously, and never successfully handled, may some day make a first-cla.s.s reputation for an historian as yet concealed in the future. That a satisfactory history of it should be written in Burnet's day was impossible, and it was equally impossible that his work should either exhibit the liveliness, or possess the unique value of his _History of his Own Times_. The theme is one for a graver and more eloquent historian than he, capable of rising to greater heights, and wielding far more absolute command over the resources of language. Nor can his laborious collections from state papers and former historians rival the importance of his narrative of transactions in which he was a busy actor, full of particulars only to be obtained from himself. With all these inevitable imperfections, his _History of the Reformation_ is still an excellent book, eminently readable, just and accurate in its broad views, however needing correction on points of detail; and, considering that it was the work of a Scotch Protestant writing in the thick of the Popish Plot, surprisingly candid and impartial. It is of course the work of a partisan, but he who does not feel sufficient interest in the Reformation to be a partisan on one side or the other is not likely to write its history at all, and had better not. Probably no history of the English Reformation has since been written that does not exhibit more party feeling than Burnet's, or that can reasonably claim to supersede it.

Burnet's _History of his Times_, as we have seen, may be regarded as a connecting link between history and _memoires pour servir_. The age of Charles II. was favourable to this latter cla.s.s of composition, which is, indeed, the form which the narrators of public transactions in which they themselves have borne a leading part, naturally fall. The period was still more fertile in the diary, which may be defined as the autobiographic memoir in a rudimentary stage. One writer of the day, Samuel Pepys, has placed himself for all time at the head of this cla.s.s of composition, by an achievement little likely to be repeated. Among memoir-writers proper the most important is Edmund Ludlow, the Cato of the Commonwealth (1617-1692).

Ludlow, the son of a Wilts.h.i.+re knight of extreme political views, enlisted at the commencement of the Civil War in the bodyguard of the Earl of Ess.e.x, and afterwards highly distinguished himself by his obstinate, though unsuccessful defence of Wardour Castle, in his native county. He was made prisoner, exchanged, and took part in several encounters in the West of England. Elected member for Wilts.h.i.+re, he sided with the more extreme party, and was one of the king's judges. He became a member of the Council of State, and at the beginning of 1651 was sent to Ireland as second in authority to Ireton, whom he a.s.sisted in completing the subjugation of the country, and subsequently filled the same position under Fleetwood. Bitterly opposed to Cromwell's Protectorate, he resigned his civil appointment, but contrived to retain his military position until 1655, when, coming over to England, he was arrested and imprisoned in Beaumaris Castle. When at length he was admitted to an audience of Cromwell, 'What,' asked the Protector, 'can you desire more than you have?' 'That which we fought for,' replied Ludlow, 'that the nation might be governed by its own consent'--words which recall Augereau's repartee to Napoleon on the re-establishment of Roman Catholicism in France. Ludlow was kept under surveillance until the death of Cromwell, when he became exceedingly active, and upon the abdication of Richard Cromwell was sent again to Ireland in a position of authority. Returning, he sought in vain to mediate between the Parliament and the army, and distinguished himself in the Convention Parliament by a vain protest against the Restoration. He fled the country to avoid the vengeance of the new government, and took refuge in Switzerland, where he composed his memoirs, and abode in comfortable circ.u.mstances, although occasionally molested by plots against his life or liberty, until his death in 1692. The Revolution of 1688 had brought him back to England for an instant, but the public feeling against regicides was still too strong, and, returning to his refuge at Vevay, he carved over his door:

'Omne solum forti patria quia Patris.'

Ludlow was not one of the greatest or wisest characters of his time, but is one of the most estimable in virtue of his st.u.r.dy honesty. He was one of that hopelessly inconsistent cla.s.s of persons, the believers in the divine right of a republic as the sole form of political inst.i.tution consistent with reason, who in the same breath a.s.sert and take away the nation's right to choose its own form of government by forbidding its exercise unless the form has the allowance of a theory impersonated in themselves. On the principle of popular sovereignty, no form of government could be more legitimate than the Restoration monarchy, which, nevertheless, Ludlow was always seeking to overthrow. Cromwell's t.i.tle was by no means so clear, and Ludlow's firm resistance to the Protector at the height of his power, if proving his inability to 'swallow formulas,' and look solely to the public good, is nevertheless most honourable to his courage and fort.i.tude. If inaccessible to reason, he was even more so to self-interest. The historical value of his memoirs is very great, especially for the troubled interval between Cromwell's death and the Restoration. Carlyle, Guizot, and Firth unite in following him with implicit confidence when he speaks as an eyewitness, when he relies upon others he is frequently inaccurate and confused. The _Memoirs_ virtually commence with the outbreak of the Civil War, and extend to 1672. The interest of the latter years is of course mainly personal. The style is clear and unadorned. The following pa.s.sage is a good example of the writer's power of conveying antipathy by sarcasm:

'Different were the effects that the death of Cromwell produced in the nation: those men who had been sharers with him in the usurped authority were exceedingly troubled, whilst all other parties rejoiced at it: each of them hoping that this alteration would prove advantageous to their affairs. The Commonwealthsmen were so charitable to believe that the soldiery being delivered from their servitude to the General, to which they were willing to attribute their former compliance, would now open their eyes and join with them, as the only means left to preserve themselves and the people.

Neither were the Cavaliers without great hopes that new divisions might arise, and give them an opportunity of advancing their minion, who had been long endeavouring to unite all the corrupt interests of the nation to his party. But neither the sense of their duty, nor the care of their own safety, nor the just apprehensions of being overcome by their irreconcilable enemy, could prevail with the army to return to their proper station. So that having tasted of sovereignty under the shadow of their late master, they resolved against the rest.i.tution of the Parliament. And in order to this it was agreed to proclaim Richard Cromwell, eldest son of Oliver, Protector of the Commonwealth, in hopes that he, who by following his pleasures had rendered himself unfit for public business, would not fail to place the administration of the government in the hands of those who were most powerful in the army. Accordingly the proclamation was published in Westminster, at Temple-Bar, and at the Old Exchange, with as few expressions of joy as had ever been observed on the like occasion. This being done, the Council issued out orders to the officers of civil justice to act by virtue of their old commissions till new ones could be sent to them: and that nothing might be omitted to fortify the new government, various means were used to procure addresses from all parts, which were brought in great numbers from the several counties in England, Scotland, and Ireland, as also from divers regiments of the army. One of the first acts of the new government was, to order the funeral of the late usurper; and the Council having resolved that it should be very magnificent, the care of it was referred to a committee of them, who sending for Mr.

Kinnersley, master of the wardrobe, desired him to find out some precedent, by which they might govern themselves in this important affair. After examination of his books and papers, Mr. Kinnersley, who was suspected to be inclined to popery, recommended to them the solemnities used upon the like occasion for Philip the Second, king of Spain, who had been represented to be in purgatory for about two months. In the like manner was the body of this great reformer laid in Somerset House: the apartment was hung with black, the daylight was excluded, and no other but that of wax tapers to be seen. This scene of purgatory continued till the first of November, which being the day preceding that commonly called All Souls, he was removed into the great hall of the said house, and represented in effigy, standing on a bed of crimson velvet covered with a gown of the like coloured velvet, a sceptre in his hand, and a crown on his head. That part of the hall wherein the bed stood was railed in, and the rails and ground within them covered with crimson velvet. Four or five hundred candles set in flat s.h.i.+ning candlesticks were so placed round near the roof of the hall, that the light they gave seemed like the rays of the sun: by all which he was represented to be now in a state of glory.

This folly and profusion so far provoked the people, that they threw dirt in the night on his escutcheon that was placed over the great gate of Somerset House. I purposely omit the rest of the pageantry, the great number of persons that attended on the body, the procession to Westminster, the vast expense in mourning, the state and magnificence of the monument erected for him, with many other things that I care not to remember.'

William Lilly, the astrologer (1602-1682), to be discussed more fully among the writers of personal memoirs, claims a few words here as the author of an account of Charles I. whose justice and liveliness would have met more general recognition, but for the author's character as a fortune-teller, and if it had not been mingled with the apparently serious exposition of idle prophecies respecting the White King. So long as he keeps clear of the occult, Lilly is a shrewd and discriminating, as well as a highly entertaining writer. His enumeration of individual traits in Charles's character is correct and instructive, and free from any misleading bias. He was in fact a time-server, whose main purpose was to stand well with the powers that were, and whose sketch of Charles would have worn another aspect if he had written after the Restoration; but this frame of mind, at all events, exempts him from political pa.s.sion, nor does his complacency carry him to the length of misrepresentation, much less calumny. He is dest.i.tute of the literary power which would have enabled him to fuse single traits into an harmonious character; but he has supplied others with very valuable material towards such an undertaking. One merit the book certainly possesses in an eminent measure, it is one of the most readable in the language. The following pa.s.sage indicates the author's real insight into Charles's attractive, but infirm character; and, adversary as he is, his remarkable agreement with Clarendon, of whose work he had no knowledge:

'He had much of self-ends in all that he did, and a most difficult thing it was to hold him close to his own promise or word: he was apt to recede, unless something therein appeared compliable, either unto his own will, profit, or judgment; so that some foreign princes bestowed on him the character of a most false prince, and one that never kept his word, unless for his own advantage. Had his judgment been as sound, as his conception was quick and nimble, he had been a most accomplished gentleman: and though in most dangerous results, and extraordinary serious consultations, and very material, either for state or commonwealth, he would himself give the most solid advice, and sound reasons, why such or such a thing should be so, or not so; yet was he most easily withdrawn from his own most wholesome and sound advice or resolutions; and with as much facility drawn on, inclined, to embrace a far more unsafe, and nothing so wholesome a counsel. He would argue logically, and frame his arguments artificially; yet never almost had the happiness to conclude or drive on a design in his own sense, but was ever baffled with meaner capacities. He feared nothing in this world, or disdained any thing more than the convention of a Parliament; the very name was a bugbear unto him. He was ever refractory against the summoning of a Parliament, and as willingly would embrace an opportunity to break it off. This his averseness being well known to some grave members, they contrived at last by wit, and the necessity of the times, that his hands were fast tied up in granting a triennial sitting, or a perpetuity as it were unto this present Parliament, a thing he often blamed himself for subscribing unto, and as often those who importuned him thereunto.'

Bulstrode Whitelocke (1605-1676) has few pretensions to rank as a man of letters; but his _Memorials_ are far too valuable a source of historical information to be omitted from a survey of the literature of the period.

The author, a barrister and a Templar, was elected to the Long Parliament in 1641, and appointed chairman of the committee for drawing up the charges against Strafford. He held various offices under the Parliament, and was employed in negotiations with Charles, of whose execution he disapproved. He was subsequently a member of the Council of State, and one of the commissioners of the Great Seal. In 1653 he was sent on an emba.s.sy to Sweden, which he has described in a valuable work.

During the confused period between the death of Cromwell and the Restoration he was successively a commissioner of the Great Seal and a member of the Council of State. He had some difficulty in obtaining pardon at the Restoration; but ultimately Charles II. admitted him to his presence, and received him graciously, with a speech which Whitelocke's biographer thinks extraordinary, but which appears very sensible: 'Mr. Whitelocke, go into the country; don't trouble yourself any more about state affairs; and take care of your wife and your sixteen children.' Whitelocke profited by the royal admonition, and died at a good old age. His _Memorials_ extend from 1625 to 1659, and are a valuable body of material, being for most of the time a diurnal record of all occurrences of importance. They are the student of history's indispensable companion for the period, but aim at no more exalted position in literature than that of a matter-of-fact register.

Another diarist of a similar description to Whitelocke, but not, like him, a busy actor in the scenes which he describes, is Narcissus Luttrell (1657-1732), a scion of the well-known family of Luttrell of Dunster, Somersets.h.i.+re. Luttrell, who was a man of literary and antiquarian tastes, and the collector of the Luttrell Ballads, now in the British Museum, kept a diary from 1675 to 1714, which attracted little attention until Macaulay's frequent references to the MS. induced the University of Oxford to publish it in 1857.

Leaving diarists out of account, the most important writer of historical memoirs after Ludlow is Sir William Temple (1628-1699), whose memoirs treat of his own political career from 1672 to 1680. Temple, the son of an Irish judge, entered the diplomatic service after the Restoration under the auspices of Arlington, and soon found himself minister at Brussels. While occupying that post it was his good fortune to perform one of the most creditable diplomatic achievements on record, the negotiation of the triple alliance between England, Holland, and Sweden, which checked the conquests of Louis XIV., and, but for the venality and faithlessness of Charles II., would have long secured peace to Europe.

When Temple's work was undone he retired into private life, but the failure of Charles's disgraceful policy brought him again into diplomacy, and his memoirs down to 1679 are occupied with foreign affairs. In 1677 he had rendered his country one of the greatest services that any man ever did, by bringing about, in conjunction with Danby, the marriage of William of Orange with the Princess Mary; and in 1679 he found himself, to his discomfort and dismay--for if wise as a serpent he was timid as a dove--charged with the mission of reconciling king and people, who, from the discovery of Charles's baseness in accepting a pension from France, seemed on the verge of entire estrangement. Temple attempted to attain this end by the creation of a council of thirty advisers, as a perpetual check upon the king's actions. The scheme might have succeeded if thirty disinterested politicians had been forthcoming; but the entire kingdom could barely have furnished the number requisite for the redemption of Sodom.

Temple's memoirs give a lively picture of the mortifications he underwent as he gradually dwindled into a cipher; but the modern reader will prefer to study the story in Macaulay's famous essay, which, if exaggerated in his expression of scorn for Temple's irresolution, is not unfair as a statement of fact. At length he escaped to his books and gardens, and spent the rest of his life in the enjoyment of a character for consummate statesmans.h.i.+p, which he took care never to bring to the test. Wisdom and virtue he certainly did possess, but both with him were too much of the self-regarding order. His claims to rank as a restorer of English prose are better founded, though these, too, have been exaggerated. Johnson's a.s.sertion that Temple was the first writer who attended to cadence in English prose merely evinces how completely the power of appreciating the grand harmonies of the Elizabethan period had died out in the eighteenth century. He must, notwithstanding, be allowed an honourable place among those who have rendered English prose lucid, symmetrical, and adapted for business; and Macaulay has justly pointed out that the apparent length of his sentences is mainly a matter of punctuation. The elegance of the writer, and the egotistic caution of the man, are excellently represented by the concluding pa.s.sage of his _Memoirs_:

'Upon the survey of all these circ.u.mstances, conjunctions, and dispositions, both at home and abroad, I concluded in cold blood, that I could be of no further use or service to the king my master, and my country, whose true interests I always thought were the same, and would be both in danger when they came to be divided, and for that reason had ever endeavoured the uniting them; and had compa.s.sed it, if the pa.s.sions of some few men had not lain fatally in the way, so as to raise difficulties that I saw plainly were never to be surmounted.

Therefore, upon the whole, I took that firm resolution, in the end of the year 1680, and the interval between the Westminster and Oxford parliaments, never to charge myself more with any public employments; but retiring wholly to a private life, in that posture take my fortune with my country, whatever it should prove: which as no man can judge, in the variety of accidents that attend human affairs, and the chances of every day, to which the greatest lives as well as actions are subject; so I shall not trouble myself so much as to conjecture: _fata viam inveniant_.

'Besides all these public circ.u.mstances, I considered myself in my own humour, temper, and dispositions, which a man may disguise to others, though very hardly, but cannot to himself.

I had learned by living long in courts and public affairs, that I was fit to live no longer in either. I found the arts of a court were contrary to the frankness and openness of my nature; and the constraints of public business too great for the liberty of my humour and my life. The common and proper ends of both are the advancement of men's fortunes; and that I never minded, having as much as I needed, and, which is more, as I desired. The talent of gaining riches I ever despised, as observing it to belong to the most despisable men in other kinds: and I had the occasions of it so often in my way, if I would have made use of them, that I grew to disdain them, as a man does meat that he has always before him. Therefore, I never could go to service for nothing but wages, nor endure to be fettered in business when I thought it was to no purpose. I knew very well the arts of a court are, to talk the present language, to serve the present turn, and to follow the present humour of the prince, whatever it is: of all these I found myself so incapable, that I could not talk a language I did not mean, nor serve a turn I did not like, nor follow any man's humour wholly against my own. Besides, I have had, in twenty years experience, enough of the uncertainty of princes, the caprices of fortune, the corruption of ministers, the violence of factions, the unsteadiness of counsels, the infidelity of friends; nor do I think the rest of my life enough to make any new experiments.

'For the ease of my own life, if I know myself, it will be infinitely more in the retired, than it has been in the busy scene: for no good man can, with any satisfaction, take part in the divisions of his country, that knows and considers, as I do, what they have cost Athens, Rome, Constantinople, Florence, Germany, France and England: nor can the wisest man foresee how ours will end, or what they are like to cost the rest of Christendom as well as ourselves. I never had but two aims in public affairs; one, to see the king great as he may be by the hearts of his people, without which I know not how he can be great by the const.i.tutions of this kingdom: the other, in case our factions must last, yet to see a revenue established for the constant maintaining a fleet of fifty men of war, at sea or in harbour, and the seamen in constant pay; which would be at least our safety from abroad, and make the crown still considered in any foreign alliances, whether the king and his parliaments should agree or not in undertaking any great or national war. And such an establishment I was in hopes the last parliament at Westminster might have agreed in with the king, by adding so much of a new fund to three hundred thousand pounds a year out of the present customs. But these have both failed, and I am content to have failed with them.

'And so I take leave of all those airy visions which have so long busied my head about mending the world; and at the same time, of all those s.h.i.+ning toys or follies that employ the thoughts of busy men: and shall turn mine wholly to mend myself; and, as far as consists with a private condition, still pursuing that old and excellent counsel of Pythagoras, that we are, with all the cares and endeavours of our lives, to avoid diseases in the body, perturbations in the mind, luxury in diet, factions in the house, and seditions in the state.'

CHAPTER XI.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND BIOGRAPHY.

Two private diarists, whose autobiographic records remained unknown to their contemporaries, have justly obtained cla.s.sic 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 _navete_, 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, a.s.suming c.o.xcomb,' '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 authors.h.i.+p, and that his high character and influential friends.h.i.+ps 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 princ.i.p.ally upon his _Diary_ and his _Sylva_, which will be noticed in another place. The chief literary merits of the _Diary_ are its una.s.suming 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 circ.u.mstances 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 Suss.e.x. 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 hards.h.i.+ps 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 pa.s.sage:

'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 coa.r.s.e canva.s.s 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 _navete_ 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 pa.s.sages 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 Huntingdons.h.i.+re, 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 clerks.h.i.+p 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 princ.i.p.ally supplied in the edition of the Rev. Mynors Bright, 1875; and Mr. Henry Wheatley is now publis.h.i.+ng an edition absolutely complete, with the exception of some few pa.s.sages positively unprintable.

No work of the kind in the world's literature can for a moment be compared to Pepys's _Diary_; but many circ.u.mstances 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 a.s.suredly 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 doc.u.ment 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 workmans.h.i.+p 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 mult.i.tude of persons of lower degree of almost every cla.s.s 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 att.i.tude, 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:

'Ein guter Mensch in seinem dunkeln Drange Ist sich des rechten Weges wohl bewusst.'

It is impossible to pa.s.s 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 p.r.i.c.k 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 _navete_ of these pa.s.sages, 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 princ.i.p.ally 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: