“’I am very much annoyed that I am prevented from assisting at the ceremony to-day.  It would be very good if you would say that nothing but very urgent business would have kept me away.  I was anxious to give my testimony to the merits of Pepys as an Admiralty official, leaving his literary merits to you.  He was concerned with the administration of the Navy from the Restoration to the Revolution, and from 1673 as secretary.  I believe his merits to be fairly stated in a contemporary account, which I send.

                         “’Yours very truly,
          
                              “’Northbrook.

     “The contemporary account, which Lord Northbrook was good enough to
     send him, said: 

“’Pepys was, without exception, the greatest and most useful Minister that ever filled the same situations in England, the acts and registers of the Admiralty proving this beyond contradiction.  The principal rules and establishments in present use in these offices are well known to have been of his introducing, and most of the officers serving therein since the Restoration, of his bringing- up.  He was a most studious promoter and strenuous asserter of order and discipline.  Sobriety, diligence, capacity, loyalty, and subjection to command were essentials required in all whom he advanced.  Where any of these were found wanting, no interest or authority was capable of moving him in favour of the highest pretender.  Discharging his duty to his Prince and country with a religious application and perfect integrity, he feared no one, courted no one, and neglected his own fortune.’

“That was a character drawn, it was true, by a friendly hand, but to those who were familiar with the life of Pepys, the praise hardly seemed exaggerated.  As regarded his official life, it was unnecessary to dilate upon his peculiar merits, for they all knew how faithful he was in his duties, and they all knew, too, how many faithful officials there were working on in obscurity, who were not only never honoured with a monument but who never expected one.  The few words, Mr. Lowell went on to remark, which he was expected to say upon that occasion, therefore, referred rather to what he believed was the true motive which had brought that assembly together, and that was by no means the character of Pepys either as Clerk of the Acts or as Secretary to the Admiralty.  This was not the place in which one could go into a very close examination of the character of Pepys as a private man.  He would begin by admitting that Pepys was a type, perhaps, of what was now called a ‘Philistine’.  We had no word in England which was equivalent to the French adjective Bourgeois; but, at all events, Samuel Pepys was the most perfect type that ever existed of the class of people whom this word described.  He had all its merits as well as many of its defects.  With all those defects, however perhaps in consequence of them—­Pepys