Between the work of Thomas Bewick and the work of Samuel Pepys, it is
idle to attempt any ingenious connecting link, save the fact that they
both wrote autobiographically. The "Pepys" in question here, however, is
not the famous _Diary_, but the Secretary to the Admiralty's "only other
acknowledged work," namely, the privately printed _Memoires Relating to
the State of the Royal Navy of England, for Ten Years, 1690_; and this
copy may undoubtedly lay claim to exceptional interest. For not only
does it comprise those manuscript corrections in the author's
handwriting, which Dr. Tanner reproduced in his excellent Clarendon
Press reprint of last year, but it includes the two portrait plates by
Robert White after Kneller. The larger is bound in as a frontispiece;
the smaller (the ex-libris) is inserted at the beginning. The main
attraction of the book to me, however, is its previous owners--one
especially. My immediate predecessor was a well-known collector,
Professor Edward Solly, at whose sale in 1886 I bought it; and he in his
turn had acquired it in 1877, at Dr. Rimbault's sale. Probably what drew
us all to the little volume was not so much its disclosure of the
lamentable state of the Caroline navy, and of the monstrous toadstools
that flourished so freely in the ill-ventilated holds of His Majesty's
ships-of-war, as the fact that it had once belonged to that brave old
philanthropist, Captain Thomas Coram of the Foundling Hospital.
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