The political references lead him beyond England, and we hear with consternation now and again about the dangerous doings of the Covenanters in Scotland.  We hear much also of France and Holland, and still more of Spain.  Outside the familiar European lands there is a fringe of curious places like Tangier, which is of great account at that time, and is destined in Pepys’ belief to play an immense part in the history of England, and of the more distant Bombain in India, which he considers to be a place of little account.  Here and there the terror of a new Popish plot appears.  The kingdom is divided against itself, and the King and the Commons are at drawn battle with the Lords, while every one shapes his views of things according as his party is in or out of power.

Three great historic events are recorded with singular minuteness and interest in the Diary, namely, the Plague, the Dutch War, and the Fire of London.

As to the Plague, we have all the vivid horror of detail with which Defoe has immortalised it, with the additional interest that here no consecutive history is attempted, but simply a record of daily impressions of the streets and houses.  On his first sight of the red cross upon a door, the diarist cries out, “Lord, have mercy upon us,” in genuine terror and pity.  The coachman sickens on his box and cannot drive his horses home.  The gallant draws the curtains of a sedan chair to salute some fair lady within, and finds himself face to face with the death-dealing eyes and breath of a plague-stricken patient.  Few people move along the streets, and at night the passenger sees and shuns the distant lights of the link-boys guiding the dead to their burial.  A cowardly parson flies upon some flimsy excuse from his dangerous post, and makes a weak apology on his first reappearance in the pulpit.  Altogether it is a picture unmatched in its broken vivid flashes, in which the cruelty and wildness of desperation mingle with the despairing cry of pity.

The Dutch War was raging then, not on the High Seas only, but at the very gates of England; and Pepys, whose important and responsible position as Clerk of the Acts of the Navy gave him much first-hand information, tells many great stories in his casual way.  We hear the guns distinctly and loud, booming at the mouth of the Thames.  The press-gang sweeps the streets, and starving women, whose husbands have been taken from them, weep loudly in our ears.  Sailors whose wages have not been paid desert their ships, in some cases actually joining the Dutch and fighting against their comrades.  One of the finest passages gives a heartrending and yet bracing picture of the times.  “About a dozen able, lusty, proper men came to the coach-side with tears in their eyes, and one of them that spoke for the rest began, and said to Sir W. Coventry, ’We are here a dozen of us, that have long known and loved, and served our dead commander, Sir Christopher Mings, and have now done the last office of laying him in the ground.