SAMUEL PEPYS.•
IT was only natural that the late President of the Pepys Club, to whom all lovers of literature are so much indebted, should view the subject of his labours in a more serious light than that in which the public have agreed to regard him ; but to base the fame of Pepys upon his solid merits as a conscientious Civil Servant, which apparently Dr. Wheatley wished to do, is to misapprehend the true nature of his claim to our remembrance. It is the peculiar virtue of a Civil Servant to make his work necessary and himself superfluous ; to organize his Department so well that when he ceases to control its movements the machinery he has created should work smoothly on, undisturbed by the change in the guiding hand upon its levers. So it always has been. Now and again, by some happy accident, the tide of official promotion sweeps into power a man with the true bureaucratic genius. For a time he is the Colossus of his office, and perhaps even cute a considerable figure in the world at large ; and then he is superannuated and gathered to his fathers; and in a few more years" nothing remains to mark his transit, except his initials on documents mouldering in remote pigeon-holes, and a vague tradition current amongst the Heads of Sections that " A. B." originated the procedure with regard to Treasury circulars which was superseded by the Order in Council of 1897. We cannot imagine Pepys himself, with all hie passion for respectability and the good report of men, being willing to barter his unique reputation for so frigid an immortality. We remember him, not for what he did, but for what he was. We remember his vivid enjoyment of the good things of life : a • Occasional Papers read by Members at Meetings of the Samuel Pepys Club. Edited by the late B. B. Wheatley, D.C.L. London : printed for the Club at the Chiswick Press. [428. net.]
good play, a good sermon, a good book, or a good dinner ; we delight in his quaint bargainings with his conscience, his strange
devices to evade the bonds he laid upon himself, and the stranger candour with which he tells us of them ; we rejoice in the odd flashes of genuine human feeling, of kindliness and sympathy and honest remorse for past misdoings, which emerge from the thick mist of sordid vice and hypocrisy with which so much of his life was clouded. Pepys the Diarist holds a peculiar position in our memories from which Pepys the Secretary to the Admiralty would be ill advised to attempt to oust him ; he has nothing to gain by demanding a share of that cold respect which is all we can extend to many men of immeasurably higher character, such as Sir Charles Trevelyan or Sir James Stephen.
The present volume is composed of a number of short papers read before the Club at their various meetings, of which perhaps the three contributed by Dr. D'Arcy Power on the medical history of Mr. Pepys and his wife make the largest positive addition to the previous stock of information on the subject. It is a real satisfaction to be able to believe, on reasonably sound evidence, that certain of the darker shades in Pepys's character may fairly be attributed to constitutional defects. Mr. Popys Cockerell's analysis of the portraits of Pepys is also a noteworthy contribution, although we cannot help regretting that he condemns as spurious the medallion portrait by Le Merchant, now in the British Museum, in which, notwithstanding Mr. Cockerell's anathema, we fancy we can detect a very distinct and most pleasing resemblance to the Diarist.
Previous page
