Admitted a sizar?

Banging on about Pepys once more, but yesterday's Life of the Day from the Dictionary of National Biography was his, and included a paragraph on his education:

• St Paul's gave Pepys a leaving exhibition in 1650, and on 21 June he entered his name at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where his uncle John Pepys LLD was a fellow. Several members of the family had distinguished themselves in the law, and Samuel seemed to be headed in the same direction. But it was at Magdalene that he was admitted a sizar on 1 October, and where he took up residence on 5 March 1651. On 3 April he was advanced to a scholarship on the foundation of John Spendluffe. Perhaps an invitation came from the new master, John Sadler, a neighbour of the Pepyses in Salisbury Court; another influence may have been Samuel Morland, who became Pepys's tutor, and who knew the Montagus. Whatever the circumstances, it was a move which Pepys and the college only once had occasion to regret (when he was reprimanded for drunkenness in hall on the night of 20 October 1653). Pepys retained fond memories of the college beer and the 'town tart'; he also made many lasting friendships. In the first year he kept with Robert Sawyer, a third-year man and a future attorney-general. Richard Cumberland, later bishop of Peterborough, had been a contemporary of Pepys at St Paul's, but it was at Magdalene that they became close friends. On 4 October 1653 Pepys was elected to a Smith scholarship. He took his BA in March 1654, recording his new status in a book of cabalistic hokum which had taken his fancy. After he left Cambridge Pepys regularly visited his old college; he proceeded MA on 26 June 1660.

So how many of those terms in orange were you familiar with?

Reprint: Pepys into the future

Interesting to note that Samuel Pepys, when he died in 1703, had no idea that he was the great diarist of the English language. In his own time he was known as a superb administrator responsible for major developments in the British Navy. Some consider that his major achievement, and the diaries as mere juvenalia (Pepys was 27 when he started, which is not really juvenile I know).

Well, perhaps he had an inkling, on is death he was found to have left precise instructions as to the handling of the six volumes: their preservation and eventual publication (one published one's own work in those days).

Still, let that be a lesson: you never know how posterity will treat you. He might easily have had a housekeeper like Carlyle's, or an executor like Kafka's.

Yes, I've started reading Claire Tomalin's The Unequalled Self. I won't be reporting back, because that would be presumptuous, given the author and the subject. You either read the book because it is, or you don't ever.

One thing, though. In the blurbs quoted on the inside pages, Philip Henscher of The Observer refers to Pepys as "the most neglected of great English writers". Is he joking? I can think of quite a few more neglected that household-name Pepys. What about Hazlitt, for example?

The Diary, by the way, is available to read in the most enjoyable form imaginable, day by day, here. They have several RSS options.

Samuel Pepys