And So to Bed

By Otto Friedrich

THE DIARY OF SAMUEL PEPYS Edited by Robert Latham and William Matthews; University of California; 11 volumes; $320

THE ILLUSTRATED PEPYS

Edited by Robert Latham; University

of California; 240 pages; $15.95

The young servant was "mighty pretty," thought Samuel Pepys, and it was not long before his wife "did find me embracing the girl con my hand sub su coats." In that babel of cryptic foreign words, inscribed in an equally cryptic shorthand, Pepys confided to his diary all the earthiest details of his rakish life in London in the 1660s. There was plenty to confide. Mrs. Pepys made him dismiss the girl. Pepys gave his servant a lofty talk, warning her to "have a care for her honour and to fear God." He then paid her 20 shillings to tell him her next address. Pepys not only regularly deceived his wife but beat her. "She giving me some cross answer, I did strike her over her left eye such a blow, as the poor wretch did cry out." He beat his servants too. When one of them denied some domestic misdemeanor, Pepys whipped him so hard that he could only marvel "that such a little boy as he could be able to suffer half so much as he did to maintain a lie ... So to bed, with my arme very weary."

The diarist was not some ignominious hypocrite; he was a high-placed hypocrite. Pepys, a Secretary of the Royal Navy, regularly took bribes, praising God for his increasing riches. On one occasion, when he received an envelope that felt full of money, he artfully opened and emptied it without actually looking inside, "that I might say I saw no money in the paper if ever I should be questioned about it." It is that candor, conveying irresistibly the sense of life as it was, that finally begins to make Pepys rather likable after all. And so history has come to rely on his vivid descriptions of all he saw: the Restoration of the Crown after the Cromwellian revolution, the Great Fire of London, the return of the Black Death, even the petty details of King Charles II in conference. "All I observed there is the silliness of the King," Pepys wrote, "playing with his dog all the while, or his codpiece, and not minding the business."

After nine years of recording everything in his secret diary, Pepys abandoned it at age 36 because he mistakenly feared that he was going blind. He died rich and respectable three decades later, bequeathing to his college at Cambridge a library of 3,000 volumes and the bookcases he had had made to hold them. On an obscure shelf of one case, in six leather-bound volumes, lay the diary of his youth; there it remained, virtually untouched for more than a century. Pieces of the private confessional, often full of errors, appeared throughout the 19th century, until the ten-volume edition of 1893 established itself as authoritative. True to its time, however, it omitted virtually all of Pepys' erotic escapades.

Pepysians began talking about a new, correct and complete edition as long ago as 1926, but the labors of retranscribing and annotating the 1.3 million-word text were heroic. The first three volumes finally appeared, to general huzzas, in 1970; the last volume of Pepys' text appeared in 1976, to even louder applause.

Now comes yet more. Volume X, titled Companion, is a kind of Pepysopedia, ranging from biographical sketches of all the myriad characters to a 25-page essay on Pepys' passion for music. "Music and women I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is," he confessed. Volume XI, finally, is an index, bibliography and list of corrections, and with that, this handsomely definitive work is done.

Is it perhaps too definitive for all but the most dedicated Pepysians? The editors have thought of that too. The solution is a splendid one-volume abridgment with lots of color pictures: The Illustrated Pepys. As the Victorian editors represented their times, the modern editors reflect theirs: the political history is much condensed, the bawdy parts all included.

--By Otto Friedrich This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.