THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

undergraduate, was not transcribed until the early nineteenth century (a bowdlerized version was published in 1825,
but a thorough transcription had to wait until 1970-83). The original editing was deemed to be necessary not because
Pepys had used his shorthand, as was sometimes customary with his contemporaries, to record significant ideas in
sermons (he records sleeping through many of the sermons he heard) but because he chose to present an account of
what Coleridge was later memorably to call ‘the mind in undress’. Pepys is sheepishly honest about his extramarital
sexual diversions. In September 1663, for example, he records taking a Mrs Lane with him to Lambeth ‘and there did
what I would with her but only the main thing, which she would not consent to, for which God be praised’. Later we
find him describing his amorous adventures in a peculiar private language cobbled together from English, French,
Italian, and Spanish: ‘And so I walked to Herberts and there spent a little time avec la mosa, sin hazer algo con ella
que kiss and tocar ses mamelles, que me haza la cosa a mi mismo con grand plaisir.’ Pepys’s ‘undressed’ mind is,
however, far from simply self indulgent or self condemnatory. He writes a frank account of his daily affairs, noting the
state of his health as much as that of the nation he serves, annually congratulating himself on his personal good
fortune and thanking God for his advancement and that of the realm. The diary serves as an indispensable historical
source largely because of the receptive and steady mind of its maker. His accounts of court and parliamentary
intrigues and gossip, of the workings of the Admiralty administration, and of great public misfortunes, such as the
Plague of 1665 and, most memorably, the Great Fire of London of 1666, are interspersed with sharp observations on
food and dress, on servant problems and domestic comforts, on medical progress and novelty in poetry, on music (for
which he had a passion) and manners (for which he had a sharp eye). Pepys had a particular relish for the repertory
on offer in the newly opened London theatres, showing a preference for Jonson’s comedies over those of Shakespeare:
A MidsummerNight’s Dream, acted at the King’s Theatre in 1662, struck him as ‘the most insipid ridiculous play that
I ever saw in my life’ (though he rejoiced at the innovative presence of ‘handsome women’ on the stage); two years
later a performance of Bartholomew Fair at the same theatre provoked the sentiment that it was ‘the best comedy in
the world’; Volpone proved ‘a most excellent play’, but Twelfth Night, which he saw in 1663, was ‘a silly play and not
relating at all to the name or day’. His appreciation of Shakespeare’s tragedies, both in performance and on the page,
is, however, evident not simply in his comments on Macbeth (‘a most excellent play for variety ... one of the best
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plays for a stage’) but also in his claim to be able to recite Hamlet’s soliloquy ‘To be or not to be’ by heart.
Compared to Pepys’s the diary of his friend John Evelyn (1620-1706) seems staid, self-consciously pious, even
reserved. It is far more a formal record of the public events of what Evelyn’s epitaph described as ‘an age of
extraordinary events, and revolutions’ interspersed with informed reflections on the high culture and the scientific
enterprise of the period. In his lifetime, and in the century following, Evelyn was known as a connoisseur, an amateur
antiquarian and, above all, as the author of Sylva: or a Discourse of Forest Trees (1664), a scientific disquisition on
the art of arboriculture and the cultivation of the informal garden. His diary, which was discovered in 1813 and
published five years later, covers the years 1620-1706, from the reign of James I to that of Queen Anne. The first part,
offering an account of his family, his youth, and an educational tour across Western Europe during the period of the
Civil War, was written retrospectively in 1660; the second section dates from the early 1680s; only the third part,
dealing with the years from 1684 onwards, is actually a contemporary diary. Evelyn emerges from his ‘Kalendarium’,
as he called it, as a man of illimitable curiosity. He has a keen eye for painting and sculpture, noting with pride his
‘discovery’ in 1671 of the talent of the wood-carver, Grinling Gibbons, ‘in an Obscure place ... neere a poore solitary
thatched house’. Despite his admiration for the increasingly unfashionable architecture of the Middle Ages (he found
Salisbury Cathedral ‘the compleatest piece of Gotic Worke in Europe, taken in all its uniformitie’), he is convinced of
the superiority of the ordered regularity of the classical style, admiring the Renaissance buildings of Rome as a young
man and, later, the mastery of the ‘incomparable’ Sir Christopher Wren. His interest in the possibilities of the new
science is manifold. He makes a point of witnessing operations for gallstone and for gangrene, studies the effects of
torture on the human body, becomes an early member of the new Royal Society, and delights in Sir Thomas Browne’s
eclectic and somewhat fusty ‘Cabinet of rarities’. Throughout, he professes an informed loyalty to the teachings and
practices of the Church of England as opposed to the religious fragmentation imposed under the rule of the ‘archrebell’
Cromwell. When in 1685 the Catholic Duke of York, James II, succeeds Charles II on the throne, he
confidently proclaims that ‘the Doctrine of the Church of Eng: will never be extinguish’d, but remaine Visible though
not Eminent, to the consummation of the World’. In his view of religion, as much as in his observation of things
secular, Evelyn is well aware of the necessity of accommodation to the Zeitgeist of the latter half of the century, the
new spirit, developed from the ideas of Bacon, of rational clarity and practical enquiry. If, on the one hand, a
performance of Hamlet in 1662 seems to him to ‘disgust this refined age’, on the other an old priest preaching in the
manner of Lancelot Andrewes in 1683 (‘full of Logical divisions, in short and broken periods and latine sentences’)
seems quirkily old-fashioned to an ear grown accustomed to a ‘plaine and practical’ exposi-