The Restoration , the Dutch War , the delinquencies of James II .sx , the Revolution and the advent of William III .sx were events enough to occupy public attention without a thought being given to the minor fry who in quiet corners may have been quietly distinguishing them-selves .sx No , Pepys was a man of no sort of public distinction or prominence .sx He was merely a conscientious , a diligent official whose name was heard of in connection with the Navy as the Navy loomed large in the public eye , an expert full of departmental information and highly spoken of in the Navy , a man of no special note and perhaps occasionally seen to be rather pompously filled with the dignity of office , an associate in later days of the learned and artistic and assumed therefore himself to be learned and artistic .sx One of the Duke of York's minions , tarred with his brush , too cautious to be an active conspirator , one time an ambitious climber who had achieved a certain position .sx Again in later days a cast-off official in bad odour in retirement , said to collect curios , but only seen by a few in his seclusion .sx His friends tell of him as a genial companion with a sense of humour and keen power of enjoyment , one who loves a good story , and is always very ready to listen .sx No fine gentleman , undistinguished , and , judging by his portraits , physically unattractive ; but by no means vulgar in the modern sense of the word , probably a little pretentious , fond of self-display and over-dressing ; certainly no celebrity , no bearer of a name that will live , but a man occupying a niche of his own making , not on account of any genius or even talent , but because of his many aptitudes and interestsand his abundant power of appreciation ; not known as a collector of gossip and not condemned as a purveyor of gossip ; a pleasant fellow to meet , but not impressing himself by social charm or conversation ; not conspicuous in company , away there in his corner , except that a passing glance in his direction might be arrested by the unusual sparkle of his vigilant eye .sx A man who made no deep scratch on the surface of life in his day , but whose official integrity won for him respect in his department , whose constancy preserved for him the affection of a few friends , and whose pleasant occupations brought him to the knowledge of men of learning .sx There is nothing in all this which actually clashes with or contradicts the character disclosed after a century and a quarter had passed .sx But the husk did not look the least like the kernel .sx CHAPTER III .sx PEPYS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY .sx THE absence in the eighteenth century of any full biographical notices of men of the preceding century by no means signifies a dearth of men of note at that time .sx People in the eighteenth century were self-sufficient ; they were interested in themselves and set but little store on the records of their predecessors , except perhaps in the more remote classical period .sx The art of biography of which Boswell may be said to be the English founder , and which amounts in these days to a passion , only began to flourish fully in the nineteenth century when the revival of history and archaeology and the study of original documents turned men's eyes with ever-growing interest towards the past .sx Nevertheless there were names which were remembered and many books which were handed on .sx Pepys's name was not among them ; in no biographical dictionary of that date is he mentioned , and nothing from his pen immediately survived him .sx Samuel Pepys died at the age of seventy in 1703 .sx He was buried in St. Olave's Church , Crutched Friars , beside his wife Elizabeth .sx The press notice in the London Post Boy for June 5 merely states :sx Yesterday in the evening were performed the obsequies of Samuel Pepys Esq .sx in Crutched Friars' Church ; whither his corpse was brought in a very honourable and solemn manner from Clapham .sx The pall-bearers were his old friend Henry Hyde , Earl of Clarendon ; Sir Anthony Deane ( who like Pepys had suffered imprisonment ) ; the honourable Mr. Hatton ; the Earl of Feversham ; Sir Thomas Littleton ( a Treasurer of the Navy ) , and Mr. James Vernon ( who had been Secretary of State but was for the time being under a cloud) .sx John Evelyn , although invited , was prevented by his infirmity from being present .sx The Universities , the Royal Society , and the Admiralty were represented .sx Mourning was provided for 43 persons , and 123 rings of three different values were presented to those invited , according to their degree .sx These details are quoted to show that suitable , but not excessive , pomp and ceremony accompanied the last rites to the retired official .sx But there the matter ended .sx No monument was erected to his memory .sx His name was quickly forgotten .sx Not till 179 years later , in 1882 , was Pepys accorded a special monument , which was unveiled by Mr. Russell Lowell , the American Minister , on behalf of the Earl of Northbrook , First Lord of the Admiralty , who was unavoidably absent .sx What tangible evidence was left to remind the immediately succeeding generations of Pepys's existence ?sx His portraits and his library and collections .sx Nothing else outside the Admiralty .sx Here his name and reputation lingered on , and could be revived by those who took the trouble to dig in the Admiralty .sx archives .sx A commission which reported in June 1805 referred to him as " a man of extraordinary knowledge in all that related to the business of the Navy , of great talents and the most indefatigable " .sx Similar eulogies could be found without difficulty of defunct officials among departmental papers .sx John Jackson , with all his affection and admiration for his uncle , found nothing to present to the public in the shape of literary remains .sx Judging by his letters Jackson seems to have been a commonplace young man , and one wonders what he thought about the Diary .sx Like a dutiful nephew he undertook a revision of the catalogue of the library in 1705 , so he must have come across it .sx Whatever qualities he may have had he certainly cannot have been endowed with his uncle's curiosity .sx While written records of the later Stuart worthies may be few , their painted images abound .sx Lely and Kneller were kept as busy as any portrait - painters ever were .sx Was anyone painted as often as Pepys ?sx Apart from Royalty it would seem doubtful .sx He was painted by Savil , Hales , Lely , and several times by Kneller .sx This does not cover the whole ground .sx There are several anonymous portraits among which is an excellent painting of him taken in 1687 , now hanging in the official residence of the First Lord of the Admiralty .sx There is also a medallion by Cavalier and a bust .sx It would appear at first as if Pepys was determined that his name and fame should be handed down to posterity by the perpetuation of his features .sx There is some reason for supposing that this idea was not absent from his mind , because in his letter to Evelyn persuading him to have his portrait paintedfor a collection , Pepys speaks of " those few whose memories ( when dead ) I find myself wishing I could do aught to perpetuate " .sx But judging by his childishly amusing remarks in the Diary when he sits to the various painters , it would seem more probable that he was just indulging one of his hobbies undertaken in the spirit of an artistic collector without much thought of posterity , or , more likely still , that he was endeavouring by this means to magnify his own importance in the eyes of his contemporaries .sx At any rate the scattered canvases among the plethora of portraits of that time did little or nothing to keep the memory of Pepys alive .sx Again , in the exceedingly elaborate instructions he left with regard to his books and collections the idea of benefiting a grateful posterity was not so much in his mind as the collector's instinct , which is something apart .sx Zeal for collecting is only incidentally accompanied by any profound knowledge and is often devoid of the highest artistic sensibility .sx This is well illustrated by the collection in the Pepysian Library .sx Magdalene College possesses neither the books of a great literary light nor the collections of a great artist .sx But the contents of the library are eminently characteristic of Pepys as he was known in his day the naval expert , the " ingenious " person , the " curious " man , the amusingly childish and somewhat unscrupulous collector .sx So fond had he become of his collections , which occupied all his time in his retirement , and so strongly was he endowed with a sense of orderliness and neatness , that he anxiously desired that the collection should remain intact and not be broken up on his death .sx It .sx had become his life's work , and it was the collection itself and not its accessibility to posterity of which he was primarily thinking .sx He was of course proud to act as a benefactor , and naturally turned to his old college as a suitable place for the reception of his treasures , although in the first instance they were left to his nephew John Jackson .sx He began his collection in Diary days , or even before , and there are references to it in many of the entries .sx A few of them may be quoted .sx But in his later days he added many more volumes , and his nephew on his travels collected for him .sx As late as 1701 he writes to Evelyn about " my two or .sx three months' by-work of sorting and binding together my nephew's Roman " .sx The library comprises a heterogeneous collection of manuscripts , curios , scraps , and books .sx There is Sir Francis Drake's pocket-book , James II .sx 's pocket-book for the time he was Lord High Admiral , a beautiful parchment manuscript roll of the Tudor Navy with coloured pictures of the ships , the first part of which was " lent " to Pepys by Mr. Thynn , " Library keeper " at St. James's , the second part given him by Charles II .sx It is to be feared that books and papers which were lent to Pepys were not always punctually returned .sx He writes to Evelyn in 1692 " in reference to that vast treasure of papers which I have had of yours so many years in my " , and in 1700 the Secretary of the Admiralty of that day demanded the return of " several books and papers still in your custody , particularly your public Letter " .sx When he wanted something very much in the way of a book Pepys had a habit of just taking it .sx He would sometimes order a book for his private library and have it put down to the Admiralty account " I think I will let the King pay for " , he explains) .sx Mr. Gaselee is probably right when he suggests that the valuable Armada book in the library , which gives lists of the ships' officers and provisions of the Spanish Armada on sheets bound together in a vellum binding , was originally preserved in the Admiralty , having come from one of the captured ships of the Armada .sx But it was considered by Pepys to be more suitably housed and accessible if transferred to his own private library than if it were left in the shelves of the Admiralty archives .sx There are in the library volumes upon volumes of scrap-books in which , carefully pasted with elaborately ruled lines and inscriptions devised by Paul Lorrain , Pepys's copyist , are drawings and prints with the margins ruthlessly cut , of pastimes , views , customs , costumes , etc. , etc. There are bound-up collections of tracts , of chap-books , of broadside English ballads , Spanish ballads , and Scottish poetry ; there is a collection of specimens of handwriting , some of which are actually cut out from manuscript notably a strip deliberately extracted by Pepys's scissors from the Durham gospels ; and there are a number of illustrations of small writing or micrography in which Pepys was particularly interested .sx Among the treasures must be mentioned a really valuable curio in the shape of a mediaeval sketch-book belonging to some .sx English artist of the late fourteenth century , and containing rough studies of saints , birds , patterns , and grotesque .sx figures not all by the same hand , and a most beautifully illuminated fifteenth-century manuscript of the Apocalypse .sx