“But for Pepys’s amazing indiscretion and garrulity, qualities of which one cannot have too little in life, or too much in the record of it, Evelyn would have been esteemed the first diarist of his age”, wrote Richard Garnett in an introduction to William Bray’s edition of The Diaries of John Evelyn (1901). They might not have survived at all had the antiquarian William Upton not visited Lady Evelyn one day in 1813 and been given “many packets and basketfuls” of his papers, some of which had already been cut up and used as needlework patterns. Fortunately a large number were eventually deposited at Christ Church, Oxford and, in 1995, sold to the British Library.
In 2015, the TLS published an article by Stuart Gillespie of Glasgow University about a collection of Evelyn’s unpublished occasional poems and translations in the British Library’s holdings. These had gone largely unnoticed partly, Gillespie suggests, because it was assumed that most, or all, of them had been printed in Evelyn’s lifetime, and partly because of the state of the manuscript itself: “The document [had] suffered considerable fading, the handwriting [was] of Lilliputian proportions, and many leaves [were] discoloured by damp”. Some of Evelyn’s translations had been published, such as his version of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (1656); but, as Gillespie pointed out in Newly Recovered English Classical Translations 1600–1800 (2018), the fact that the verse of seventeenth-century gentleman poets frequently survives in a single manuscript implies that the translator meant his work only for his family or himself.
“On my Deare Child M.E.” is an elegy for Evelyn’s eldest daughter, Mary, who died of smallpox in 1686 at the age of nineteen. After her death, Evelyn recorded in his diary that “the justnesse of her stature, person, comeliness of her countenance and gracefulnesse of motion, natural and unaffected (though more than ordinaryly beautifull), was … of the least, compared with the ornaments of her mind”. She was, in short, “the joy of [his] life” (March 16, 1685). Four days later, he wrote to Lord Godolphin that she had such an “admirable facility and Inclynation to Musique, that she sung not onely with judgement, but could accompany, the sweetest voice (that yet I ever heard) with a thorough-basse on the Harpsichord”. Now the poet’s “Funebral dirge” is matched only by the mournful silence of the instrument to which it is dedicated: “let none / Ere touch thee more, now she is gon”.
On my Deare Child M.E.
Elegie
To her Harpsichord
Peace mournfull Instrument, let none
Ere touch thee more, now she is gon:
Let none a pleasing Song recite,
Or that may give the Eare delight:
May nothing thee hence forth become
But the sad Epicedium;
And numbers which soft passions move
For long pursuit, and fruitlesse Love.
Thy Muse is fled, sad Elegy,
And Tristia belong to thee.
Mithinks thou seems’t before mine Eyes
A Coffin drest for Obsequies;
Funebral dirge, dim Tapers thee
Best suit, and with thy shape agree.
Let none then skill’d at Graves to weepe
In artfull teares of Sorrows deepe
(Who mercenarie throbbings faine)
Our undissembl’d mourning staine:
He who has lost an onely Child,
Or from’s dear country is exiled;
He who has lost a vertuous Wife,
The sweete Companion of his Life;
Or (all in One to Comprehend)
He who has lost a steady Friend
(Whom he did love as his owne Soule)
With me let him our losse condole
For such a Daughter: let him here
On every Chord let fall a Teare:
And in sad accents of remorse,
Mourn perfectly our common losse.
How oft’ severer thoughts divert
And in Seraphic Aires impart
Chast Songs, and sacred Hymns indite!
(For such were only thy delight)
With what a grace us’d shee to sing!
How free, how cleare her voice! Each string,
Each key she touch’d, did seeming strive
To answer her Recitative:
But her sweete note so far out-went
The voice of Strings and Instrument;
So soft, so liquid, so distinct
Was every Accent, and so link’t
To all she sung, and what we heare,
As charm’d all sense into the Eare.
Mourn Bartholomeo, Pedro mourn,
Your Harmonie to Discords turne.
Who now shall your Composures trace?
Who sing them with such skill, such grace!
And soft Italia’s mealting notes
(For song best made, and warbling Throats)
And now she’s gon, your Fame improve!
Would you know whither gon? Above:
She who was wont to touch these strings,
Now in a choire of Angels sings.
Allelujah.
JOHN EVELYN (2015)
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