PEPYS

Mr. Pepys was a Puritan. Froude once painted a portrait of Bunyan as an
old Cavalier. He almost persuaded one that it was true till the later
discovery of Bunyan's name on the muster-roll of one of Cromwell's
regiments showed that he had been a Puritan from the beginning. If one
calls Mr. Pepys a Puritan, however, one does not do so for the love of
paradox or at a guess. He tells us himself that he "was a great Roundhead
when I was a boy," and that, on the day on which King Charles was
beheaded, he said: "Were I to preach on him, my text should be--'the
memory of the wicked shall rot.'" After the Restoration he was uneasy lest
his old schoolfellow, Mr. Christmas, should remember these strong words.
True, when it came to the turn of the Puritans to suffer, he went, with a
fine impartiality, to see General Harrison disembowelled at Charing Cross.
"Thus it was my chance," he comments, "to see the King beheaded at White
Hall, and to see the first blood shed in revenge for the blood of the King
at Charing Cross. From thence to my Lord's, and took Captain Cuttance and
Mr. Shepley to the Sun Tavern, and did give them some oysters." Pepys was
a spectator and a gourmet even more than he was a Puritan. He was a
Puritan, indeed, only north-north-west. Even when at Cambridge he gave
evidence of certain susceptibilities to the sins of the flesh. He was
"admonished" on one occasion for "having been scandalously overserved with
drink ye night before." He even began to write a romance entitled _Love a
Cheate_, which he tore up ten years later, though he "liked it very well."
At the same time his writing never lost the tang of Puritan speech.
"Blessed be God" are the first words of his shocking Diary. When he had to
give up keeping the Diary nine and a half years later, owing to failing
sight, he wound up, after expressing his intention of dictating in the
future a more seemly journal to an amanuensis, with the characteristic
sentences:

Or, if there be anything, which cannot be much, now my amours to
Deb. are past, I must endeavour to keep a margin in my book open,
to add, here and there, a note in shorthand with my own hand.

And so I betake myself to that course, which is almost as much as
to see myself go into my grave; for which, and all the discomforts
that will accompany my being blind, the good God prepare me.

With these words the great book ends--the diary of one of the godliest and
most lec