Sylva, Vol. 1 | Page 3

Commissioner for the Affairs of Tangier and Treasurer, he
visited Tangier officially. He twice became Secretary to the Admiralty,
and was twice elected to represent Harwich in Parliament, after having
previously sat for Castle Rising. He was also twice chosen as Master of
the Trinity House, and was twice committed to prison, once on a charge
of high treason, and the other time (1690) on the charge of being

affected to King James II., upon whose flight from England Pepys had
laid down his office and withdrawn himself into retirement. Elected a
Fellow of the Royal Society in 1665, he attained the distinction of
being its President in 1684. He was Master of the Clothworkers'
Company, Treasurer and Vice-President of Christ's Hospital, and one
of the Barons of the Cinque Ports. In 1699, four years before he
succumbed to a long and painful disease borne with fortitude under the
depression of reduced circumstances, he received the freedom of the
City of London, principally for his services in connection with Christ's
Hospital.
From the hasty sketch drafted in the above outlines, it will be seen that
throughout all Pepys' manhood the circumstances of his daily life and
environment were much more similar to those of Evelyn than to those
of Walton, who may well be ranked as their senior by almost one
generation. Like Evelyn, Izaak Walton was rather the child of the
country than a boy of the town. Born in Stafford in 1593, he only came
to settle in London after he had attained early manhood. Thus, though a
citizen exposing his linen drapery and mens' millinery for sale first in
the Gresham Exchange on the Cornhill, then in Fleet Street, and latterly
in Chancery Lane, the Bond Street of that time, he ever cherished a
longing for more rural surroundings and a desire to exchange life in the
city for residence in a smaller provincial town. On the civil war
breaking out in Charles the Ist's time, he retired from business and went
to live near his birth place, Stafford, where he had previously bought
some land. Here the last forty years of his long life were spent in ease
and recreation. When not angling or visiting friends, mostly brethren of
the angle, he engaged in the light literary work of compiling
biographies and in collecting material for the enrichment of his
Compleat Angler. Published in 1653, this ran through five editions in
23 years, besides a reprint in 1664 of the third edition (1661).
In spite of the many similarities between Evelyn and Pepys as to
university education, official position, political partisanship, and social
and scientific status in London, there are yet such essential differences
between what has been bequeathed to us by these two friends that
comparison between them is almost impossible. They are both authors:

but it was by chance rather than by design that Pepys ultimately
acquired repute as an author, whereas Evelyn at once achieved the
literary fame he desired and wrote for. Neither of the two works
published by Pepys, The Portugal History (1677) and the Memories of
the Royal Navy (1690), procured for him the gratification of revising
them for a second edition, and it is indeed open to question if the Diary
upon which his undying fame rests was ever intended by him to be
published after his death. This is a point that is never likely to be settled
satisfactorily. The fact of its having been written in cipher looks as if it
had been compiled solely for private amusement, and not with any
intention of posthumous publication; and this view is greatly
strengthened by the unblushing and complete manner in which he lays
aside the mask of outward propriety and records his too frequent
quaffing of the wine-cup, his household bickerings, his improprieties
with fair women, and his graver conjugal infidelities. The improprieties
of other persons, and especially those of higher social rank than himself,
might very intelligibly have been written in cipher intended to have
been transcribed and printed after his death; but it would be at variance
with human nature to believe that he could so unreservedly have
reduced to writing all the faults and follies of his life had even
posthumous publication of his Diary been contemplated by him at the
time of writing it. For it is hardly capable of argument that, next to the
instincts of self-preservation and of the maintenance of family ties, the
desire to preserve outward appearances is undoubtedly one of the
strongest of human feelings; and this great natural law, often the last
remnant or the substitute of conscience, character, and self-respect, is
even more fully operative in a highly civilised than in a savage or a
semi-savage state of society. Of a truth, every human being is more or
less