the advancement, for the son, on balancing his father’s affairs as a tradesman, found £45 due to him, with debts to the same amount, and the balance of _zero_ showing all that he possessed of his own in the world; and yet the good old workman had sent his sons to college, and _that_ may account for his poverty. In his retirement the elder Pepys exercised his taste on alterations of his house at Brampton,—changes which his son speaks of as being “very handsome:” in other respects he was like great men in their retirement, and amused himself by writing letters, which appear to have been real “letters of news:” having his crosses however, as country gentlemen will have, and those chiefly from legal disputes touching his inheritance, which happily came, nevertheless, to a favourable conclusion. Pepys the junior warned Pepys senior against the sin of extravagance, and that with such unction that both counsellor and counselled and domestic listeners were melted to tears. The end of the advice thus given was that the sartorius emeritus should keep the expenses of himself and family “within the compass of £50 a year,”—no very princely income, it must be confessed, and one that ought to have saved them from the subsequent reproach of the official son, or rather of his lady wife, touching “the ill, improvident, disquiet, and sluttish manner that my father, and mother, and Poll do live in the country, which troubles me mightily, and I must seek to remedy it.” The remedy adopted to restore gentility to the hearth of the old tailor was one of some singularity. “All the morning,” says Pepys, under the date of September 4, 1664, “all the morning looking over my old wardrobe, and laying by things for my brother John and my father, by which I shall leave myself very bare of clothes, but yet as much as I need, and the rest could but spoil in the keeping.” Magnificent benevolence! But the old man doubtless looked modish in the son’s cast-off suit, and the influence it had on the locality is perhaps seen in the subsequent offer of marriage made to “Poll,” the tailor’s daughter, by one who had “seven score and odd pounds land per annum in possession, and expects £1000 in money upon the death of an old aunt.” This expectation was, I suppose, never realized, for “old aunts” are proverbially immortal, or given to cheat, after tormenting, their heirs, when they do condescend to pay the long-standing debt of nature. The wooer had however some positive advantages, for he possessed neither father, mother, sister, nor brother; and the value of such a man cannot be too strongly impressed upon speculating young ladies. To balance these advantages he had the slight drawback of being “a drunken, ill-favoured, ill-bred country fellow.” On the strength of a prospect of increased gentility, the elder Pepys, now half-blind and parcel-deaf, rode up to town on horseback, and saw the glories of the city, and had his picture taken, to hang in the dining-room of his