Claverhouse, with his powerful character and indomitable will, with his
Titanic daring and relentless cruelty, has the face of a singularly
beautiful young girl. Judge Jeffreys, whose delight in blood was only
equalled by the foulness and extravagance of his profanity, looks in his
picture the very type of spiritual wistfulness. Samuel Pepys, whose
large oval eyes and clear-cut profile suggest a somewhat voluptuous and
very fastidious aristocrat, was really a man of the people, sharp to a
miracle in all the detail of the humblest kind of life, and apparently
unable to keep from exposing himself to scandal in many sorts of mean
and vulgar predicament.
Since the deciphering and publication of his Diary, a great deal has
been written concerning it. The best accounts of it are Henry B.
Wheatley's _Samuel Pepys and the World he Lived in_, and Robert Louis
Stevenson's little essay in his _Short Studies of Men and Books_. The
object of the present lecture is not to give any general account of the
time and its public events, upon which the Diary touches at a thousand
points, but rather to set the spirit of this man in contrast with that
of John Bunyan, which we have just considered.
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