Samuel Pepys was the son of a tailor of the city of London; and although he affected much gentility when he himself prospered, he was honest enough to confess, in cipher and short-hand which he thought nobody could read, that let others say of his family what they might, he for his own part did not believe that it was of anything like gentle descent. Notwithstanding this confession, our friend Samuel had something within him of the aristocratic cobbler who, in the ‘Taming of the Shrew,’ makes inebriate boast that “the Slys came in with Richard Conqueror!” As Pepys was born in 1632, and his sartorial sire did not retire from his useful occupation until 1660, Samuel, the elder surviving son of a family which reckoned of offspring a dozen save one, must have had considerable homely experience of a humble life. The elder Pepys, having inherited a small landed property at Brampton, near Huntingdon, of some forty pounds a year, enjoyed his condition of modified squireship for the liberal term of twenty years. It was but a poor condition after all, and the retired tailor was often compelled to have recourse to his son, who sometimes gave him money, now and then bestowed upon him an innutritive compassion, and on one occasion magnifically endowed him with a pair of old shoes! Old Pepys was still a tailor in the City when Samuel was a sizar at Cambridge, at which seat of learning he obtained the distinction of being reprimanded for being “scandalously overserved with drink yᵉ night before.” It is further remarkable that while his sire was still behind his counter or upon it, the ambitious son, at the age of twenty-three, married a portionless girl of fifteen, with no other possession than the pride of being descended, on the mother’s side, from the Cliffords of Cumberland, and consequently from Henry VII., whose daughter Mary, after being Queen of France, espoused the Duke of Brandon, and from the latter union had issue those two daughters, one of whom became mother of Lady Jane Grey, and the other became wife and mother in the honoured household of the great Cumberland Cliffords. When Aladdin, the tailor’s son of Bagdad, married that sweet princess with the never-to-be-remembered name, two wider extremes scarcely met than when Samuel joined hands with Elizabeth de St. Michael, who brought the blood of Tudor to mingle with that of Pepys.