In fact, an air of sincere and inevitable truthfulness robs John Evelyn’s diary of all that is romantic and sentimental. We see in it the life of a highly cultivated and deeply religious man, whose fate it was to witness all those tremendous and sovereign changes which swept over England like successive tidal waves between the execution of the Earl of Strafford and the accession of Queen Anne. Sharp strife; the bitter contention of creeds; England’s one plunge into republicanism, and her abrupt withdrawal from its grim embraces; the plague; the great fire, with “ten thousand houses all in one flame;” the depth of national corruption under the last Stuarts; the obnoxious and unpalatable remedy administered by the house of Orange; the dawning of fresh prosperity and of a new literature,--all these things Mr. Evelyn saw, and noted with many comments in his diary. And from all we turn with something like relief to read about the fire-eater, Richardson, who delighted London by cooking an oyster on a red-hot coal in his mouth, or drinking molten glass as though it had been ale, and who would have made the fortune of any modern museum. Or perhaps we pause to pity the sorrows of land-lords, always an ill-used and persecuted race; for Sayes Court, the home of the Evelyns, with its famous old trees and beautiful gardens, was rented for several years to Admiral Benbow, who sublet it in the summer of 1698 to Peter the Great, and the royal tenant so trampled down and destroyed the flower-beds that no vestige of their loveliness survived his ruthless tenancy. The Tsar, like Queen Elizabeth, was magnificent when viewed from a distance, but a most disturbing element to introduce beneath a subject’s humble roof. If Defoe, that master of narrative, had written fewer political and religious tracts, and had kept a journal of his eventful career, what welcome and admirable reading it would have made! If Lord Hervey had been content to tell us less about government measures, and more about court and country life, his thick volumes would now be the solace of many an idle hour. So keen a wit, so powerful and graphic a touch, have never been wasted upon matters of evanescent interest. History always holds its share of the world’s attention. The charm of personal gossip has never been known to fail. But political issues, once dead, make dull reading for all but students of political economy; and they, browsing by choice amid arid pastures, scorn nothing so much as the recreative. Yet Lord Hervey’s epigrammatic definition of the two great parties, patriots and courtiers, as “Whigs out of place and Whigs in place,” shows how vital and long-lived is humor; and the trenchant cynicism of his unkind pleasantry is more easily disparaged than forgotten.