reign of the one, and his manifold tribulations under the other - his shoulder of mutton without a napkin, his dirty and undressed plight, his borrowed shirt and precarious rest, the little personal inconveniences, which mark the period quite as clearly as the public calamity, are all very plainly set down; yet his own measures are those of an active and careful public servant,-there is quite as little doubt of that. And Samuel escapes uninjured in home and person, in goods and family connections, from both the great national disasters of his time. But the naïve and plain-spoken autobiographer has a period put to his disclosures. Samuel must relapse into the veiled propriety of ordinary story. Samuel must be content in future with only such a record as all the world may see-for these twinkling curious eyes of his may not avail him longer for his secret ciphering, and it is with a great pang that he yields to the necessity, which is "almost as much as to see myself go into my grave,' he says, disconsolately, and so concludes a chronicle which has no equal -the clearest picture ever displayed to the world of a mind and conscience in perfect undress, with not a thought concealed. 19 And had darkness rested still upon the mysterious characters of Pepys' Diary, not Evelyn himself had shown a better example of respectability to aftercoming beholders. The Pepys who writes letters to those contemporary people with whom it is necessary to stand well, is a very different Pepys from him of the journal; and we are half inclined to take for irony the serious compliments and much respect with which he is saluted by the notable compeers, who know him so much less than we do. It is a curious fact this, among the many curious facts which this self-exposure reveals to us; no doubt Mr Pepys knew Mr Evelyn a great deal better than we know that well-mannered and worthy gentleman-but not a hundredth part so well informed was Mr Evelyn, not so learned was Mrs Pepys herself in the character of Samuel, as are we. In a corresponding space of time, over which he walks with strides of a greater measure, we find that Evelyn has a much larger share of the troubles of common life. children, among them one of those He loses several learned and pious youthful ladies, of whom he numbers several among his friends; none is fairer, sweeter, more pious, or accomplished, than his own Mary, and his grief has satisfaction in recording her perfections. Of this daughter, who died at nineteen, and of the wonderful little Richard long ago dead, at six years old, the father speaks with a full heart. It is "grit," like a river, overflooded and running wide, this grief of his, in respect to these children; and it is singular to note how differently the death of his son John, in the prime of manhood, when Evelyn himself is old, affects his calmer faculties, and how he can couple with the brief obituary a notice of my Lord of Devonshire's misfortunes on the turf. But even sorrow does not turn aside his life from its full current. John Evelyn is as busy a man, after his grave fashion, as Samuel Pepys, and a very much more disinterested one, since neither fee nor compliment seems to come in his way, in these harassing naval wars, his and his charge of the sick and wounded embarrassment how to provide for hosts of prisoners, having neither houses to receive nor money to support them, give him little satisfaction in his public labours. chirurgeons and medicaments, and Providing himself overseeing these poor maimed victims of warfare, everywhere finding accommodation inadequate, and means insufficient, Evelyn travels from town to town of his district with most conscientious zeal; nor, though the employment is very far from being an agreeable one, does he fail to devote himself to it with good-will and his best endeavours. Along margin of time is left over, however, for his own personal pursuits; and all the wonders of the time are welcome to Evelyn, who dabbles in all the arts and sciences, and has a smattering of every branch of learning under the sun. It is now that, by his skilful negotiations, Harry Howard of Norfolk bestows the Arundel Marbles upon Oxford, and a library upon the Royal Society, for which first good office Evelyn has the solemn thanks of the University, and is with much pomp and circumstance created Doctor of Laws; and now it is that he reads his paper upon forest trees-the Sylva by which he is principally known as an author-before the Royal Society, of which he may very justly be called the founder and parent, and to which he introduces various magnates, foreign and native; among them the Duchess of Newcastle and Queen Christina of Sweden, with both of whom our stately cicerone is considerably amused in his courteous way. And now it seems that among the palace-builders of this extravagant era, no one is contented without the approval of Evelyn, and we hear of him carried by this noble lord and that illustrious earl to inspect improvements and new erections, the growth of new and sudden fortunes, or the increase and reparation of old. Terraces and lofty elevations, parks and labyrinths and curious gardens, exotic plants and rare flowers, with every practicable device of landscape-gardening, pass in brilliant review before his eyes, and Evelyn maintains his place of critic loftily, and praises with discrimination, always retaining some small matter of disapproval. In one of the earliest pages of his Diary he tells us of the place where, as an infant, he was sent to nurse, "a most sweet place towards the hills, flanked with woods and refreshed with streams, the affection to which kind of solitude I sucked in with my very milk;" and the taste remains with him all his life, since we find him permitted by his brother to make an artificial lake and hermitage at Wotton in his youth, and subsequently perceive him curious in landscape-gardening during his travels and early life abroad. In gardening, as in all other arts, this age is emphatically curious," and as full of quips and conceits in its plantations as in its literature. Here is one strange instance seen abroad; it is at the palace of the Count de Liancourt in Paris :— "Towards his study nd bed-chamber is a little garden, which, though very narrow, by the addition of a well-painted perspective, is to appearance greatly enlarged; to this there is another part, supported by arches, in which runs a stream of water, rising in the aviary out of a statue, and seeming to flow for some miles, by being artificially continued in the painting, where it sinks down at the wall. It is a very agreeable deceit. At the end of this garden is a little theatre and the stage so ordered with figures of made to change with divers pretty scenes, men and women painted on light boards and cut out, and by a person who stands underneath made to act as if they were speaking, by guiding them, and reciting words in different tones, as the parts require." Have we not seen in the modern Royal Academy, within the range of these very few years, sundry acres of verdant canvass, which might add marvellously to a suburban garden "by the addition of a well-painted perspective "? At this present moment there rises upon our memory a gigantic oak, overwhelming in its multitudinous foliage. What " an agreeable deceit" might this prove, if it were but hung to advantage upon some bit of intrusive wall, in the narrow grounds of a London mansion! and how delightful the delusion, looking through scrubby lilacs and acacias, to find the forest king in all his pride, where nothing but a smoky line of brick and mortar was wont to be! But however the fashion of the art was, there can be no dispute of Evelyn's high authority in all matters of landscape-gardening, nor of the perpetual reference made to him. Of the great nobles of England many had returned from exile to find their patrimonial homes desolated by the civil war, or impaired by Roundhead occupation; there had been sieges, assaults, defences, among these houses of the great, and the age had a taste for magnificence, for costly rarities, and "curious" decorations, so that all who could, and many who in real ability could not, set about the costly work of building and improving. Mr Evelyn's journeys from one lordly seat to another are almost as frequent and as laborious as are his official pilgrimages; and Mr Evelyn is equally great on internal decoration, and on without. The fair chambers, "parthe embellishments and accessories getted with yew and divers woods," the rare tapestries of dining-hall and withdrawing-room, the Indian cabinets of my lady's elegant retirement, and the accumulation of rare and fantastic curiosities in my lord's closet, are all matters of interested comment to our virtuoso. A cabinet of coins or a painted ceiling, an "incomparable" picture or a magnificent toilet everything comes under his inspection; but of all other matters the thing in which it seems most difficult to satisfy the taste of Evelyn is, the fundamental matter of the site. Wotton is always in his eye-Wotton, where, after his illness, he goes to be recovered by his "sweet native air," and which is clearly next to his heart at all times. He finds a great many imperfections in the position of his friends' houses; one is too far from the water-one from the wood-another lies in a hollow-another has no windows towards the prospect the disadvantages are manifold; and it is rare to find the critic entirely satisfied, let him go where he will. Specially consulted and authoritative in this, there are few arts or ingenuities known which come amiss to Evelyn; a learned and wonderful infant prodigy—a philosophical cooking apparatus (would that Monsieur Papin had bequeathed his wonderful machine to the present generation, to the gladdening of many a housewifely heart, which mourns over bones and sinews unresolvable into the savoury jelly of the philosopher's supper!)-a wonderful conjuror-alternate in Évelyn's notice with Grindling Gibbons, his special protégé, whose "incomparable" carving he is the first to bring into repute-with that other "incomparable" genius, Dr Christopher Wren-with famous travellers and great inventors, with foreign savants and notables, each and all of whom contribute something to the constant accumulation of knowledge which Mr Evelyn notes so carefully. And he who plans benevolent infirmaries and makes "plots" for a new city, who plants a great society of philosophy, and does distinguished service to an illustrious college, has time withal to be interested even in the fashions of the time, and to present to the king a pamphlet called "Tyrannus, or the Mode," recommending a Persian costume, which is afterwards temporarily adopted, though Evelyn modestly declares that "he thinks" it cannot be in consequence VOL. LXXVI.-NO. CCCCLXV. of this advice of his. Added to all these, he has matrimonial negotiations, executorships, dispensings of alms from sundry quarters, and all manner of family duties and offices of friendship upon his hands. Every day, and all day long, John Evelyn lives; there is no time for vegetation in this full and energetic existence. And now there comes an abrupt conclusion to the reign of Charles. Death comes fiercely in a paroxysm and agony upon the hapless king, and in a few hurried days all is over, and James is regnant in his brother's place. His brother's eminence in vice throws James into the shade, and makes, on the whole, rather a decent creditable private man of this narrow-sighted despot. There is great hope of his beginning, for, after all, a certain honesty of intention is in the new king, and he has served the public with honour in his day. We have no longer Pepys to refer to for the unvarnished truth of public opinion, but Evelyn records his own expectations of a respectable and prosperous reign. A brief trial, however, brings sore doubt upon this subject; Popish officers begin to swarm in public employments-even that dreaded animal the Jesuit makes its appearance in open daylight at Whitehall; the Parliament is assaulted by bribes and flatteries and threatenings on every side. Toleration, a new word in the Papistical mouth, begins to be demanded with a voice gradually increasing in haughtiness, and at last and suddenly the Prince of Orange appears on the troubled scene. Hurryings to and fro, hopeless bewilderment, desertion, panic, as in a house assaulted by unseen midnight enemies, darken the air for another brief space of time; and then the scene is changed after a confused and disordered fashion, and we perceive William, very silent, very reserved, very Dutch, and not very gracious, perhaps even a little scornful of those timeserving deserters of his predecessor, setting himself down deliberately and solemnly in the royal place. But Mr Evelyn says not a word of William; only one mention of "the morose temper of the Prince of Orange, who showed little countenance to the noblemen and others, who expected a more gracious and cheerful reception D when they made their court," falls from his guarded lips. Farther, the new king is despatched with the briefest notice-his acts, his travels, his ordinances, and his death, receive only such a record as the merest official might give them; perhaps because the old English courtier is too proud to acknowledge offence on his own part with one who has at least redeemed the Church and commonweal -perhaps because he has in reality little opportunity of knowing this selfabsorbed and secret royalty, who is not given to communication. The personal friendship of Charles and James, though Evelyn's upright soul could not much approve of either, must still have left a grudge against this foreign supplanter of their race, and the current of the historian's life begins of itself to run dry and thin, a narrowed stream. His children die, and are married; Sayes Court, where he has so long been hospitable, is let to one tenant and another, and gets devastated by rude Czar Peter and his train; and the old man, getting nearly eighty, goes to Wotton, to which he succeeds as male representative of his family when he reaches his full fourscore years. Gayer and more graphic in his letters than in his solemn and authoritative Diary, it is thus the patriarch writes of his own household estate and comforts shortly before his brother's death: "My grandson is so delighted in books that he professes a library is to him the greatest recreation, so I give him free scope here, where I have near upon 22,000 [query 2000?] (with my brother's), and whither I would bring the rest had I any room, which I have not, to my great regret, having here so little conversation with the learned-unless it be when Mr Wotton (the learned gentleman beforementioned, the friend of Dr Bentley) comes now and then to visit me, he being tutor to Mr Finch's son at Albury, but which he is now leaving to go to his living that without books, and the best wife and brother in the world, I were to be pitied; but with these subsidiaries, and the revising some of my old impertinences, to the which I am adding a discourse I made on Medals (lying by me long before Obadiah Walker's Treatise appeared), I pass some of my Attic nights, if I may be so vain as to name them with the author of those criticisms. For the rest, I am plant ing an evergreen grove here to an old house ready to drop, the economy and hospitality of which my good old brother will not depart from, but more ceterum kept a Christmas, in which we had not fewer than three hundred bumpkins every holy-day. apartment of five rooms together, besides "We have here a very convenient a pretty closet, which we have furnished with the spoils of Sayes Court, and is the raree-show of the whole neighbourhood, and in truth we live easy as to all domestic cares. Wednesday and Saturday nights we call lecture-nights, when my wife and myself take our turns to read the packets of all the news sent constantly from London, which serves us for discourse the history of a very old man and his not till fresh news comes; and so you have young companion, whose society I have enjoyed more to my satisfaction these three years here, than in almost fifty before, and am now every day trussing up to be gone, I hope to a better place." Pepys, by this time retired to Clapham, and living with his former clerk, William Hewer, is childless, wifeless, and solitary in his old age, but it is comfortable to know that the ancient house of Evelyn survives in his grandson. And the Admiralty clerk has retired from all his offices-from public life entirely, indeed-while Evelyn is still alert and busy, laying the foundations of Greenwich Hospital, and labouring in his vocation still, though the more virtuous chronicler is the elder man. We can only judge of Samuel by his letters now, and these letters are epistles of edifying propriety, grave, temperate, and modest, with less hyperbole, and even less lightness of tone, than Evelyn's own. The contemporaries seem to change character in their correspondence; it is the patrician who now condescends to playful self-disclosure, whereas the Samuel of the Diary, with all his wicked vanities, his levity, and selfindulgence, is lost in the decorous Mr Pepys, so conscientious as to give up his appointments on the abdication of his royal patron, so learned in all the arts and sciences as to qualify him for the President's place among the philosophers of the Royal Society, altogether a notable and famous man. His old peering curiosity, dignified into philosophical research, sets about inquiries touching the second-sight, on which subject there are various letters from Lord Reay, and one from no less a name than Clarendon, son of the chancellor, and uncle to the queen, and curious mathematical questions, wherein he has a correspondent no less illustrious than Sir Isaac Newton. With Evelyn, Pepys boasts a frequent and most complimentary correspondence; nor does he want the respectful salutations of learned university doctors, and other magnates of the times; and in his learned leisure at Clapham, a patron of the arts, a benefactor of Alma Mater, a notable virtuoso in his own person, we look with much bewilderment for our ancient friend Samuel, with his twinkling merry eyes and wicked wishes, his simple honest vanity, and all his unveiled devices, for good and for evil. Perhaps he is only another specimen of the moderating effects of old age-perhaps only a shining exemplar of the facility with which a man can disguise himself from the observation of his fellows. Whatever the cause is, Pepys dies at last, full of honours honours which he might have kept for ever, to the edification of posterity, but for these guilty volumes in the Pepysian library, which betray the respectable Samuel. If Samuel could but have foreseen that John Smith, illustrious name! hidden afar in the profound depths of time and nature, who was destined to bring the hidden record of all his evil ways to light! With his own decorous and dignified hand Evelyn brings his record to a close. A sad record it comes to be in these last years. Autumn and coming winter are darkening over the wood; the leaves and the fruit fall heavily graveward; one and another passes before him into the other country, and solemnly come these birthdays, silent remembrancers of his own approaching end. So the old man sets his house in order, commits himself to God, and begins to be "exceeding ill, his indisposition increasing;" and, thus devout and well appointed, the master of Wotton goes forth upon his last journey, takes farewell of his fair gardens, his incomparable rarities of art, his books, and his labours, and all his delightsgoes forth, and is no more. Charles, who looks as if he might have been a heroic king, had he but had the fate to be a true one; Oliver, born in the purple, a man to whom empire and rule were a natural heritage; Charles II., poor vicious soul, whose name it is best to speak softly, and forget; James, unwise and limited, a natural-born servant, not a king; William, who is an institution, and no person; and, lastly, good roundabout Queen Anne-all except the last come to the culmination and conclusion of their reign and fate during the two contemporary lives whose course we have followed. A great rebellion-an unnatural usurpationa happy restoration-a glorious revolution- follow each other in these eventful years, and liberties and crowns lost, gained, and bartered, crowd upon the pages of history with almost unexampled speed. History, following Sir Walter's famous prescription, can but make "a great stour" of it all, with here the sworded arm of Cromwell, and there the austere and self-contained figure of William, subduing the vexed and fiery elements; and we are fain to turn aside to the lower range of atmosphere, the homely domestic firmament, which may indeed catch a frequent stain and cloud from those flying thundery vapours, but is still the unchangeable human sky, with its sunrise and its nightfall, constant as our own. How the common life goes on through all the paroxysms of national existence, how the mightiest crisis of an empire fails to overset the natural balance of a working-day, how tables are spread and houses erected in spite of wars and rumours of wars, how hearts are deeper touched with the old primitive emotions of nature than with all the politics of kingdoms-is a lesson of singular interest; and nothing can show it more plainly than do the books and the personages before us. Public personages, good posterity, but human men-living their own immediate days one by one, without much thought of your opinion of them, and being no more influenced than they could help by the convulsions of their time. To us who can sit by, and look on, well-bred spectators of a distant battle-growing mightily impatient, in the mean time, that no battle is made for our |