PEPYS' LETTERS AND THE SECOND DIARY Edited by R. G.
Howarth
It is hard to believe, as the editor of these letters says, that Pepys had any real existence before or after his famous Diary. And this selection from his correspondence covering the years 1656-1703, and the second Diary written in 1683-4 during a voyage on Admiralty business to Tangier, will be of slight interest to the general reader though absorbing to the Pepysian. The unwitting apostle of intimacy is here revealed as a busy man of affairs soliciting and being solicited, a man of diligent, amiable character and a worthy official. The elderly diarist can still exclaim in Tangier, " Merry at supper with wine in saltpetre. Spanish onions mighty good." Thus something remains of the relish of the improper 'thirties, but he is, so far as posterity is concerned, not the man he was. Certain letters indicate his patience with the troublesome family of Mary Skinner, who at his wife's death became his housekeeper and his mistress openly kept with the apparent approval of the stern John Evelyn; and one may surmise that Pepys is another . paradoxical example of the man who becomes moreable in a liaison than he was in legal wedlock. The lay livedwith him for the rest of his life and it is hard to say why the exeellent editor of this book, Pepys' Letters and the Second Diary (Dent, 7s. 6d.) should consider the affair, at its beginning, sordid. It was in accord with Restoration customs ; the worthiness of Pepys' behaviour cannot be questioned. The account of Pepys' death, written by his nephew John Jackson in a letter to John Evelyn, might have been written by Pepys himself. " . . . Upon opening his body (which the uncommonness of his case required of us) . . ." so the second paragraph begins. What appropriateness ! How strangely symbolic The letter ought to be prefixed to further editions of his Diary. For the editing and introduction of the present volume there cannot be too much praise.
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