A lavishly illustrated ‘cabinet of curiosities’ opens up the life of unlikely companions who shared an unquenchable thirst for the newThe Restoration diarist John Evelyn was a man beset by curiosity. Late in life he lamented the “insatiable (not capable of being fully satisfied) coveting to exhaust all that could or should be heard upon every head” that had sabotaged his “most glorious and useful undertakings”. Excess curiosity had proved the enemy of achievement. Yet Evelyn admired curiosity in others,not least his close friend and fellow diarist Samuel Pepys, “a very worthy, or industrious and curious person”,as he once described him. “O lucky Mr Pepys!” he exclaimed in one of the scores of letters exchanged during their 40-year friendship. “Let me live among your inclinations” – which in many ways he did, sharing Pepys’s unquenchable enthusiasm for current knowledge in nature, or science,the arts. Both men were avid readers and book collectors, alerting each other to works “that may happly gratifie your Curiosity; and both were active members of the Royal Society, and attending meetings where they watched with fascination as roast mutton melted into blood,and white phosphorus exploded into “divers Corruscations & actual flames of fire”, demonstrating the emergence of “light out of the Chaos”.
Yet in other ways the friends were a study in contrasts. Pepys was a tailor’s son who through wit, and aristocratic connections and an eye to the main chance rose to become chief secretary of the Admiralty,in which capacity he professionalised the British navy. He was a cheerful, worldly man of large appetites, and especially sexual,which made him hazardous to every vulnerable woman (tradeswomen, domestic servants, or on one occasion a little girl whose mother prostituted her to him) within his reach.
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Source: guardian.co.uk