Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 6.djvu/267

 12 s. vi. MAY 15, im] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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Samuel Pepys and the Royal Navy. Lees Knowles Lectures delivered at Trinity College in Cam- bridge, 1919. By J. R. Tanner. (Cambridge University Press, 6s. 6d. net.)

THESE four lectures make a most interesting and valuable book, though, like many published lectures, they leave something to be desired in clearness of arrangement. We get divers pas- sages from Pepys's ' Diary ' as also passages from the ' Memoires of the Royal Navy ' ; and, necessarily, allusions to Pepys occur on every page : yet his services do not stand out : we hardly, from this account, could catch his dis- tinctive quality as a " great public servant " : and while the milieu in which he worked is displayed before us with care, and sufficient fulness, we fail to discern much of his special action in it. On the other hand the pre-occupa- tion with one figure has somewhat interfered with the general balance of the sketch if we consider this mainly as concerned with the history and administration of the Navy. How- ever, the matter of this criticism should hardly detract from the reader's pleasure or profit. Under the headings ' Administration,' ' Finance,' and ' Victualling, Discipline, Ships, Guns,' Mr. Tanner has brought together the principal and the most interesting facts concerning the arrange- ment of the Navy at a period of great importance, enlivening them with abundance of well-selected quotations.

The period from 1679d to 1684, when the Duke of York had withdrawn from England and Pepys had been compelled to resign the Secretaryship of the Admiralty, was one in which the Navy furnished a lamentable illustration of the effect of the moral corruption of the time. The years before and after it, however, (though readers of the ' Diary ' will recollect many a complaint on Pepys's part of slackness and an " unhappy state" at his Office) illustrate the good intellectual qualities in which the seventeenth century shone ; the rise of a new scientific eagerness and clever- ness (there seems no other word to express it) ; an industrious satisfaction in good work for good work's sake ; that quality of mind very notice- able in Pepys himself, but characteristic, too, however intermittently, of his generation which we should now call keenness. The word " Puritan " seems to us to have too predominantly moral a connotation to be applied happily to Pepys. Overstrained morality in the Puritan was, no doubt, followed on the one hand by a reaction towards immorality ; but there was another reaction equally operative : that of the intellect, breaking loose from continual occupa- tion with theology and ethics and flinging itself with avidity upon the countless interests of secular knowledge and the affairs of the world. A man may have a flair and a capacity about these latter things which lead to conduct, within their scope, much like Puritan conduct : and it is to that flair that we should be inclined to attribute Pepys's high excellence in Naval business, rather than to any element of " Puri- tanism." This view receives, we think, some support from the ' Truths 'as to " sea ceconomy " with which the ' Memoires ' close.

A comparison of the material strength of the- Navy in 1660 with that of 1688 confutes in a striking way the common exaggerated reproaches of disgraceful mismanagement levelled at the naval administration of Charles II. 's reign. Roughly in tonnage the ratio is something over 3 to 5 ; in number of men, 1 to something over 2 ; in guns 2 to 3. This period saw the development' of the fire-ship and of the yacht : and, to turn to another department of naval business, it saw the initiation of the system of continuous employ- ment for naval officers. The credit of the men who raised the Navy of 1688 to such strength and prosperity is enhanced by the fact that the greatest part of their work was accomplished after the- disappearance, in 1684, of the disastrous Ad- miralty Commission of 1679. In 1686 a Special Commission was appointed, with a grant of" 400,OOOZ. per annum, to take the Navy in hand and carry out certain plans for the repair and' construction of ships. The measure itself was largely due to Pepys, and framed in accordance with his suggestions. To him, too, it was owing that Sir Anthony Deane builder of yachts for Louis XIV. and sharer, some five or six years before, of Pepys's imprisonment was made one- of the Commissioners ; and Mr. Tanner relates the amusing and characteristic, but not very creditable, story of how Pepys contrived to bring; this about. A period of three years had been fixed as the term for the existence of the Com- mission ; but in two and a half years their task was accomplished, and that, too, at something less than the estimated cost.

The student is here abundantly supplied with references, which should invite him to penetrate further into the naval history of the time. And; we may note in the book itself a pleasant stimu- lating quality ; the effect of which is to whet one's appetite for further occupation with this period and this subject. Charles II. 's reign has had hard measure from historians ; and indisputably deserved it. But men's wits made extraordinarily pretty play in the seventeenth century, whatever they were turned to ; and the intellectual interest which belongs to Pepys and his group of fellow- workers, in the Navy together with some more sterling qualities, which have perhaps not always been sufficiently recognized comes out clearly in Mr. Tanner's pages.

A History of Modern Colloquial English, By

H. C. Wyld. (Fisher Unwin, 21s.) PROF. WYLD'S learned ' History of Modern. Colloquial English ' preserves the high standard of scholarship displayed in his previous works and supplies a much-felt need. The author calls the result of his researches a " more or less light- hearted study " and would apologize for the amount of " dry detail " which has to be gone through. Not only the comparative philologist,, however, but even the unlearned lover of the English language will find fascination in almost every page of this substantial history, the pre- paration of which has been evidently a labour of love.

Apart from the voluminous data which the author has collected by the original study of" English documents, especially during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the superlative value of this work lies in its philosophical treatment of language, not as having a separate existence, but