Duke of York, and after an exciting passage, in which the Duke's ship was lost, he reached Edinburgh early in May. After visiting several Scottish towns, among these Stirling, Linlithgow, Hamilton, and Glasgow, he returned by road, by Berwick and Newcastle, to Scarborough and Hull.2 The Duke of York was a sincere friend. When Pepys was a victim of the plot of 1679 he had written to his royal brother in his behalf. 'Give me leave to say,' he added, 'your Majesty is bound to do something for him that has spent so many years in your service to your satisfaction.' The first outward proof of this was Pepys's appointment on Lord Dartmouth's expedition to Tangier in the autumn of 1683. His zest for public service had been somewhat dulled by his recent bitter experiences, and indications are not wanting to show that he had not outlived his old longing to escape to the country or otherwise to enjoy an honourable retirement as a virtuoso. He had probably given up the old design of retreating to Brampton to spend his time with plainness and pleasure, though with but little glory,' but in 1681 we find him attracted by a proposal to undertake the Provostship of King's College, Cambridge. Shortly after his return to England he was restored to his old place at the Admiralty 'by the Royal commands, neither sought for nor foreseen,' at a salary of £500. In the same year he was elected President of the Royal Society, in the proceedings of which he had taken a serious interest since his admission in 1665,9 and to the funds of which he had subscribed handsomely.10 He delighted in the society of the Virtuosi, and during his two years' tenure, and for some time later, held a Saturday evening symposium at his house in York Buildings. During his Presidentship he was again elected Master of the Trinity House, the first under the new charter of r685.11 Thus to be honoured with the control of naval affairs, and of the deliberations of the learned of England (he being sponsor, let us not forget, to the Principia of Sir Isaac Newton),12 and to enjoy the confidence of the King and the heirapparent, was a generous counterturn after recent misfortunes, and a combination of felicities exactly to his liking.

13

The succession of James in February 1685 did not fail to enhance Pepys's political reputation. His election for the towns of Harwich and Sandwich in May was an explicit compliment to his eminence. He sat as member for the

1 See his letter to W. Hewer, dated Edinburgh, May 8, 1682. Many of the Duke's company were drowned. Pepys was aboard the yacht Catherine.

* His impressions of Scotland are unimportant, but he speaks of Glasgow as 'a very extraordinary town for beauty and trade, much superior to any in Scotland'; also of the 'rooted nastiness' which 'hangs about the person of every Scot (man and woman) that renders the finest show they make nauseous, even among those of the first quality.'

3 Dated Brussels, May 22, 1679. B. iv. p. 216; Mynors Bright, vi. p. 131.

4

p. 510.

5 Life (1841), i. pp. 265, etc.

Pepys's Journal of this expedition, preserved in the Rawlinson Collection in the Bodleian, is printed in the Life (1841). He had visited Spain during his sojourn at

Tangier. He returned on March 29, 1684.

7 See notes, pp. xix. xx.

9

p. 636.

8 B. i. p. xxvii.

11 Evelyn's Diary, July 20, 1685.

12 As President he signed the order authorizing its publication.

13 The degree of confidence is shown by the fact that Pepys is the source for the tale of Charles II.'s death-bed conversion to Catholicism. He had been informed of this by James II. And when William of Orange landed, James II. was sitting to Kneller for a portrait which was destined for Pepys.

4

former till the dissolution in July 1687.1 The outstanding matter in this, his second, Secretaryship of the Admiralty, was the calling together of the Commission of 1686, the result of his persistent efforts to reform the administration of the Board and to restore the broken Navy.2 Work of this kind incited opposition, and the apologetic Memoirs, which he published in 1690, disclose the extent of the 'strong combination' which had endeavoured to bring his efforts to discredit.3 But the old troubles were brewing again, and the overthrow of the monarch necessarily involved his supporter. When the Convention Parliament was in the making, Pepys lost his seat at Harwich. In this he was treated no worse than had been many of his fellow-burgesses who had sat in King James's one Parliament; yet the opposition to him was wantonly exuberant. No Tower men, no men out of the Tower,' shouted the men of Harwich, as they turned their backs upon him. Within two months of James's flight to France Pepys had demitted his Secretaryship at the Admiralty (February 1689). Then history repeats itself with an accuracy which is amusing to all but the victim. When the hubbub of the 'Revolution' is dying down we hear again that Pepys has been committed to the Gatehouse at Westminster (? June 1690) under suspicion of divulging naval secrets to the French. As before, there was no proof forthcoming, and, as before, he was allowed, after appropriate delay, to remove to his home, now in York Buildings, to the care of Mrs. Fane, his estimable but bitter-tongued housekeeper. He and his former fellow-sufferer, Deane, had been worried, as we learn from Evelyn,' by a charge of fraudulent dealing with the Navy timber; but this too had passed over.

6

Though his health was broken, he was not without a certain measure of happiness in his retirement. He was far from being forgotten. Indeed it would not have been surprising had he been once more called upon to direct the affairs of the Navy, for, as the political anger subsided, all parties were fain to acknowledge the greatness of his services to the nation and his unrivalled experience. The publication of his Memoirs of the Navy in 1690 strengthened his authority with the public. The esteem of his friends, a wide and honourable circle, including Newton, Evelyn, and Kneller, continued unabated. This reputation and this loyal support could not have failed to place him again in his old post had he been younger, in better health, and more willing to place his ease in York Buildings at the bidding of political adventurers. That ease, however, was not long enjoyed. The Saturday evenings were given up; and in 1700 he was persuaded by his physicians to remove for better air to 'Paradisian Clapham' (as Evelyn calls it), to the house of his trusty clerk, William Hewer. During his last years at York Buildings he had busied himself in the reform of the administration of Christ's Hospital. In his country retreat he devised the gift of a portrait of his friend Wallis, the Savilian professor, to the University of Oxford, and he entrusted Sir Godfrey Kneller with the commission. He received the thanks of the University in October 1702 in a letter characteristically academic in compliment. We can imagine the pleasure of

1 Pepys was examined at the Trial of the Seven Bishops, June 1687. B. i. p. xxxii. 2 For a full account of Pepys's work in this matter see Tanner, u.s. pp. 66 et seq. 3 lb. p. 92. 4 Diary (ed. 1893), i. p. xlvi.

5 A letter of Feb. 8, 1690, shows that he was anxious to 'compass an election' for Parliament. Life (1841), ii. pp. 246-247.

8 B. iv. pp. 304-308.

the old secretary when he read the generous tribute to his career at the Navy Office :— Vir ornatissime. . . . Tu certe Ligneis Muris Britanniam munivisti, et quod ad utrumque Polum (sive quiddam novi exploraturi, sive victoriam circumferentes) vela nostra explicare potuissent, sola tua cura effecit. . . . Aliorum virtuti forsan debemus, ut res magnae agerentur, sed ut agi potuissent, propria gloria est industriae tuae.' The old Cambridge man had been justified in calling the University of Oxford his dear Aunt." He had not given up hope of satisfaction for the past. When his old friend Deane had intimated his retreat to Worcestershire after the Revolution, and confessed the old soldier's wish for a little space between business and the grave,' Pepys told him that he had no melancholy misgivings.' 'Nor,' he added, 'shall any solicitousness after the felicities of the next world (which yet I bless God I am not without care for) ever stifle the satisfactions arising from a just confidence of receiving some time or other, even here, the reparation due to such unaccountable usage as I have sustained in this.'2

The later pages of the Correspondence enable us to supply the softer tones to the picture of these closing days. His old friend Evelyn, much his senior in years, had retired to Wotton for the patriarchal pleasures of his fields and flocks. So, when telling Pepys of this, on July 22, 1700, he adds: ‘But can you thus hold out? will my friend say. Is philosophy, Gresham College, and the example of Mr. Pepys and agreeable conversation of York Buildings quite forgotten and abandoned? No, no! Naturam expellas furca tamen usque recurret. And then he tells him that he has been arranging 'no fewer than thirty large cases of books.'3 To this we have the following answer :-'I have no herds to mind, nor will my doctor allow me any books here. What, then, will you say, too, are you doing? Why, truly, nothing that will bear naming, and yet I am not, I think, idle; for who can, that has so much of past and to come to think on, as I have? And thinking, I take it, is working, though many forms beneath what my Lady and you are doing. But pray remember what o'clock it is with you and me; and be not now, by overstirring, too bold with your present complaint, any more than I dare be with mine, which, too, has been no less kind in giving me warning, than the other to you, and to neither of us, I hope, and, through God's mercy, dare say, either unlooked for nor unwelcome.. I wish, nevertheless, that I were able to administer anything towards the lengthening that precious rest of life which God has thus long blessed you, and, in you, mankind, with; but I have always been too little regardful of my own health, to be a prescriber to others.'

Two and a half years later, we find the indefatigable Evelyn, when sending to Clapham a critique of Clarendon's History, which had just appeared, true to the old sentiment of friendship. 'What I would wish,' he writes, 'for myself and all I love, as I do Mr. Pepys, should be the old man's life, as described in the distich, which you deservedly have attained :

Vita senis, libri, domus, hortus, lectus amicus,

Vina, nepos, ignis, mens hilaris, pietas.

In the meantime, I feed on the past conversation I once had in York Buildings, and starve since my friend has forsaken it.' 5

Thus blessed in friends and honour, but grievously vexed in body, Pepys

passed his closing days. He died on May 26, 1703.1 Ten days later his remains were laid in the vault at St. Olave's, beside his wife's and brother's.2

In all the whirligig of curiosity disclosed in the Diary and Correspondence, Pepys's most unabated interest, we might say passion, was the formation and ordering of his library. Proud as he was of his official successes, of the handsome appointment of his house, or of the figure he cut in silk and periwig among the fashionables, he was never more pleased than when planning a new bookcase with Sympson the joiner, or superintending his devoted household in the tedious rearrangement and cataloguing of his precious volumes. With them his heart and ambition lay; and so it was to the end. For in the multitudinous instructions of his will, the last of many, and written shortly before his death, there are none more particular than those which deal with 'the settlement and preservation' of his library.3 These were faithfully followed, and on the decease of his nephew Jackson, to whom he had granted a life-rent, the collection was 'placed and for ever settled' in his old College at Cambridge. There, in the handsome Bibliotheca Pepysiana, in the inner court of Magdalene, stand the old cases, the very books in the very order, the portfolios, ready to the ghostly hand. Had he retired, as he had once hoped, to the gentler duties of a College headship and uninterrupted communion with his books, he could not have compassed his wish in better way than has been done by his successors. The fascination of the place is not ordinary. The library is not a mere monument or museum. It at once awakens feelings of generous acquaintance, even of intimacy, such as we gain from the pages of the Diary. But we do not intrude here as we do in the other, into the secrets of Mrs. Pepys and Mrs. Knipp, into the gettings and goings of the bustling Secretary of the Navy Office. We are welcome to Pepys's closet as heartily as were Mr. Evelyn and his circle, and we learn as accurately as they learnt the minutest details of everything therein, of his whims, his cares, his methods, his taste in verse and bindings. What other gossip, collector, or man of affairs, or, let us say, genius, aided by his Boswell, has achieved such a triumph with posterity? Pepys's zest of life has been rewarded as such virtue should be, though it rarely is, by immortality. It is a quaint thought, that had he been less commonplace in character, less careful of the trivial and ephemeral, he might have been forgotten. For to us he is the very real corporeal Samuel Pepys, Esquire, of Axe Yard, latterly of Seething Lane, not the spiritual Pepys who is shadowed forth so prettily in his motto, drawn from Cicero and strengthened with the authority of Plato and St. Paul.1

1 Details of Pepys's last illness are given in a letter from his nephew, John Jackson, to Evelyn, May 28, 1703 [B. xxxv.], and in another from Geo. Hickes, D.D. (who attended his deathbed) to Dr. Charlett, on June 5 following [ib. xxxvi.].

2 Several portraits of Pepys are extant; by Hayls, or Hales (National Portrait Gallery), Lely (Magdalene College), Kneller (Magdalene College and the Rooms of the Royal Society), and Verrio (in a portrait group in Christ's Hospital). Others, including another by Kneller, are in private collections. See the Diary, ed. Wheatley, i. lv.; Pepysiana, pp. 67-70; and the article by Mr. Leslie Stephen in D. N.B.

3 Pepys's will has been printed in Pepysiana (1899), Appendix I. pp. 251-270.
4 Tu vero enitere, et sic habeto, te non esse mortalem, sed corpus hoc.

Nec enim

is est quem forma, ista declarat; sed mens cuiusque is est quisque, non ea figura quae digito monstrari potest' (Cicero, Somnium Scipionis, 8). See the letter to Hewer,

The chief treasure of the Bibliotheca Pepysiana is the original manuscript of the Diary, or 'Journal,' contained in a stately set of six volumes of 3012 quarto pages, bound in full calf, tooled, gilt, and stamped. The text is in character,' or cipher, which has been identified as one of the earlier systems of Thomas Shelton, described in his Tachygraphy. It is probable that Pepys had made himself familiar with this method at Cambridge. Short-writing was one of the crazes of the period, and Pepys was doubtless attracted to it in the first instance because it suited his turn for the ingenious, rather than because it secured secrecy. There is evidence in the Diary that he was interested in the making of different ciphers, and the shelves of his library show that he made an extensive collection of works on stenography. He used the system for the drafting of letters and for memoranda in the business of his office. There is no doubt that by using it in the Diary he was tempted to record many things which he would not have written out in longhand, but his extreme concern for the safety of the manuscript shows that he had no mistaken views of the risks to which his secrets were exposed. He had little to fear from Mrs. Pepys, had her curiosity been aroused and had she discovered the copy of Shelton in his book-case, and clerk Hewer could be trusted; but other people were cunning in 'tachygraphy,' and some of the Brounckers and Penns would have been glad to see their colleague in the pillory of his own making. So he guarded these volumes painfully, giving them his first care with his money-bags. He was once tempted to tell his secret to his friend Coventry, whom he had found engaged in a similar task, but he has added, 'I am sorry almost that I told it him, it not being necessary, nor maybe convenient to have it known.'5 When a few months later his eyes had so failed him that he could no longer continue his Journal, he regretfully concludes, and, therefore, resolve, from this time forward, to have it kept by my people in longhand, and must be contented to set down no more than is fit for them and all the world to know; or, if there be anything, I must endeavour to keep a margin in my book open, to add, here and there, a note in shorthand with my own hand.'6

4

Had some ingenious hand' of the eighteenth century chanced on these secret memoirs in the Magdalene collection, we should for certain have had a complete text, and much editorial worry had been saved. On one occasion, strangely enough almost immediately after the establishment of the Library at Cambridge, Pepys's secret was within an ace of being disclosed. One Peter Leycester, a correspondent of John Byrom, the Jacobite poetaster, had, during a week's visit to Cambridge in May 1728, found his way into the Bibliotheca Pepysiana, and had been specially interested in the books on shorthand. This he told Byrom, who was himself a stenographer; and he added, 'We found five large volumes quarto, being a journal of Mr. Pepys; I did not Dec. 23, 1690 (B. iv. p. 250), apropos of 'the late learned descant made by some of the Admirals' on his motto, Mens cuiusque is est quisque.

The

1 Facsimiles of the cipher are given by B. i.; Mynors Bright, i.; and in Pepysiana (1899). * B. ascribed the 'character' to Jeremiah Rich, whose Pen's Dexterity was not published till 1654 See the paper by Mr. J. E. Bailey, reprinted from Papers of the Manchester Literary Club,' ii. 1876, in Mr. Wheatley's Pepysiana, App. II. pp. 270 et seq. Tachygraphy of 1641, to which Pepys was indebted, was the sequel to several experiments by Shelton, and was in turn supplanted by his Zeiglographia in 1649. 3 See p. 506. He had shown it once before, in an offhand way, to a young lieutenant in the Navy (April 11, 1660, in later edd.). 6 p. 755.

5

p. 726.