Pepy´s annual Commemoration Service

Abstract

Report to the Secretaries of the Royal Society. —Discharging the duty assigned to me by the Royal Society, I attended on 22 June the Pepys Commemoration Service at St Olave s Church. Here it was that the unique Diarist, as a faithful parishioner of Crutched Friars, listened critically to so many sermons; and here lies buried. The Rector, the Rev. Prebendary Wellard, B.D., busily engaged with his verger in receiving guests, waived my lack of a card of invitation and placed your Representative honourably in the front pew, under the pulpit and next to the Press. The excellent choir would have won praise from Pepys himself (as good musique as ever I heard). The Prebendary carried the service through in dramatic style and gave a spirited and even racy address. This he timed by the inverting of a sand-glass: but the sand had stood evenly atop and alow and so remained during his discourse. The belated nineteenth-century memorial to Samuel Pepys was ceremonially decked with a wreath of laurel: while the lively contemporary effigy of Elizabeth, his ‘poor wife,’ looked on eagerly from her perch in the chancel. Methought she might marvel to hear praises for his courage, remembering that early morning one November when they both lay afeard: though truly it proved that the noise of thieves in the house was but the sweeping of the next-door chimneys. Yet a few months earlier he had stood up gallantly enough, when impeached at the Bar of the House, fortissimus semper fortis . And, in good sooth, if candour were courage . . . !