214 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



[No. 149. 



interest in its perihelion to Morality, or its nearest 

 possible neighbourhood to, or least possible distance 

 from, Honour and Honesty. And yet what a cold 

 and torpid Saturn, with what a sinister and leaden 

 shine, spotty as the moon, does it appear, com- 

 pared with the principles and actions of the re- 

 gicide, Colonel Hutchinson, or those of the Puritan, 

 Richard Baxter (in the Autobiography edited by 

 Sylvester), both the contemporaries of Pepys." 



Pepi/s. — Vol. ii. p. 46. : " He tells me the King of 

 France hath his mistresses, but laughs at the foolery of 

 our King, that makes his bastards princes," &c. 



Coleridge. — "Mem. Earl of Munster. This, 

 with wit and condescension, was all that was 

 wanting to a perfect parallelism in the character 

 of George IV. with that of Charles II., and this he 

 left to be supplied by his worthy brother and suc- 

 cessor." 



Pepys. — Vol. ii. p. 55. : " Engaged under hand and 

 seal to give the man that obtained it so much in behalf 

 of my Lord Chancellor." 



Coleridge. — " And this was one of the three 

 idols of our church ; for Clarendon ever follows 

 Charles the Martyr, and the Martyr, Laud ! 

 Alas ! what a strange thing the conscience seems 

 to be, when such actions and deliberate falsehoods 

 as have been on strong grounds imputed to Lord 

 Clarendon, — among others, the suborning of assas- 

 sination, — could be made compatible in his own 

 mind with professions of religion and habitual re- 

 ligious meditations and exercises." 



Pepys Vol. ii. p. 62. : " The Dutch are known to 



be abroad with eighty sail of ships of war, and twenty 

 fire-ships, and the French come into the channell with 

 twenty sail of men of war and five fire-ships, while we 

 have not a ship at sea," &c. 



Coleridge, — " There were good grounds for 

 the belief, that more and yet worse causes than 

 sensuality and sensual sloth were working in the 

 king's mind and heart, viz. the readiness to have 

 the French king his Master, and the Disposer of 

 his Kingdom's power, as the means of becoming 

 himself the uncontrolled Master of its wealth. 

 He would fain be a Despot, even at the cost of 

 being another's Underling. Charles II. was will- 

 ing, nay, anxious, to reduce his Crown and King- 

 dom under the domination of the Grand Monarque, 

 provided he might have the power to shear and 

 poll his subjects without leave, and unchecked by 

 the interference of a parliament. I look on him 

 as one of the moral Monsters of History." 



Pepys. — Vol. ii. p. 108. 



Coleridge. — " To initiate a young student into 

 the mystery of appreciating the value of modern 

 History, or the books that have hitherto passed 

 for such, — First, let him carefully peruse tliis 

 Diary, and then, while it is fresh in his mind, take 

 mp and read Hume's History of England, reign of 



Charles II. Even of Hume's reign of Elizabeth, 

 generally rated as the best and fullest of the work, 

 I dare assert, that to supply the omissions alone, 

 would form an Appendix occupying twice the 

 space allotted by him to the whole Reign, and the 

 necessary rectification of his statements half as 

 much. What with omissions, and what with per- 

 versions, of the most important incidents, added to 

 the false portraiture of the character, the work 

 from the reign of Henry VII. is a mischievous 

 romance. But alike as Historian and as Philo- 

 sopher, Hume has, meo saltern judicio, been extra- 

 vagantly overrated. Mercy on the age, and the 

 people, for Avhoni Locke is profound, and Hume 

 subtle." 



Pepys. — Vol. ii. p. 110. : " , . . .do hear Mr. 

 Cowly mightily lamented (his death) by Dr. Ward, 

 the Bp. of Winchester, and Dr. Bates ... as the 

 best poet of our nation, and as good a man." 



Coleridge. — " .'.' — Yet Cowley was a poet, which 

 with all my unfeigned admiration of his vigorous 

 sense, his agile logical wit, and his high excel- 

 lencies of diction and metre, is more than (in the 

 strict use of the term Poet) I can conscientiously 

 say of Dryden. Only if Pope was a Poet, as Lord 

 Byron swears, then Dryden, I admit, was a very 

 great Poet. W. Wordsworth calls Lord Byron the 

 Mocking Bird of our Parnassian Ornithology ; but 

 the Mocking Bird, they say, has a yQYj sweet song 

 of his own, in true Notes proper to himself. _ Now 

 I cannot say I have ever heard any such in his 

 Lordship's volumes of AVarbles ; and spite of Sir 

 W. Scott, I dare predict that in less than a cen- 

 tury, the Baronet's and the Baroti's Poems will 

 lie on the same shelf of Oblivion, Scott be read 

 and remembered as a Novelist and the Founder of 

 a new race of Novels; and Byron not remem- 

 bered at all, except as a wicked Lord who, from 

 morbid and restless vanity, pretended to be tea 

 times more wicked than he was." 



Pepys. — Vol. ii. p. 125. : " To the Bear Garden . . 

 saw the prize fought, till one of them, a shoemaker, was 

 so cut in both liis wrists that he could not fight any 

 longer . . . The sport very good." 



Coleridge. — " ! Certainly Pepys was blest with 

 the queerest and most omnivorous taste that ever 

 fell to the lot of one man." 



Pepys. — Vol. ii. p. 151.: "To the King's Playhouse, 

 and there saw a silly play and an old one, The Taming 

 of a Shrew," 



Coleridge. — " This is, I think, the fifth of Shak- 

 speare's Plays, which Pepys found silly, stupid 

 trash, and among them Othello! Macbeth, in- 

 deed, he commends for the shews and music, but 

 not to be compared with the ' Five Hours' Ad- 

 ventures' ! ! This, and the want of wit in the 

 Hudibras, is very amusing, nay, it is seriously in- 

 structive. Thousands of shrewd and intelligent 

 men, in whom, as in S. Pepys, the Understanding 



