was then a perfect rhyme. In the "Rape of the Lock" tea (tay)
rhymes with obey, and in Cowper's verses on Alexander Selkirk sea rhymes
with survey.' It is not likely that the pronunciation of the name was
fixed, but there is every reason to suppose that the spellings of Peyps
and Peaps were intended to represent the sound Pepes rather than Peeps.

In spite of all the research which has brought to light so many
incidents of interest in the life of Samuel Pepys, we cannot but feel
how dry these facts are when placed by the side of the living details of
the Diary. It is in its pages that the true man is displayed, and it has
therefore not been thought necessary here to do more than set down in
chronological order such facts as are known of the life outside the
Diary. A fuller "appreciation" of the man must be left for some future
occasion.

H. B. W.

JANUARY 1659-1660

[The year did not legally begin in England before the 25th March
until the act for altering the style fixed the 1st of January as the
first day of the year, and previous to 1752 the year extended from
March 25th to the following March 24th. Thus since 1752 we have
been in the habit of putting the two dates for the months of January
and February and March 1 to 24--in all years previous to 1752.
Practically, however, many persons considered the year to commence
with January 1st, as it will be seen Pepys did. The 1st of January
was considered as New Year's day long before Pepys's time. The
fiscal year has not been altered; and the national accounts are
still reckoned from old Lady Day, which falls on the 6th of April.]

Blessed be God, at the end of the last year I was in very good health,
without any sense of my old pain, but upon taking of cold.

[Pepys was successfully cut for the stone on March 26th, 1658. See
March 26th below. Although not suffering from this cause again
until the end of his life, there are frequent references in the
Diary to pain whenever he caught cold. In a letter from Pepys to
his nephew Jackson, April 8th, 1700, there is a reference to the
breaking out three years before his death of the wound caused by the
cutting for the stone: "It has been my calamity for much the
greatest part of this time to have been kept bedrid, under an evil
so rarely known as to have had it matter of univers