PEPYS' PRAYER BOOK.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 134, 8 June 1936, Page 6

PEPYS' PRAYER BOOK.

Recently for the first time there was shown to the public the Prayer Book of Samuel Pepys, which has been presented to St. Olave's, the famous little church in Seething Lane, London, which the diarist and his wife attended for many years and in which they lie buried. It has. been given to the church by one of the diarist's "" descendants, Mrs. Pepvs-Cockerell, 011 the condition that it remains in the church and is not sold, and thus joins a small contemporary portrait of Pepys and some other Pepysiana in the tower room in the crypt. It is a handsome, thickly-bound book, royal octavo size, with brass lock and corner plates, and consists of Prayer Book and metrical version of the Psalms, dated ltjSO. There is 110 inscription in Pepys' handwriting, but the original title page has been removed and in its place there is substituted an elaborate scrollwork design in brown inks, believed to be the work of Pepys' friend, Edward Cocker, the famous seventeenth-century writing master. Besides this flourish of penmanship, recalling a carved ceiling of Grinling Gibbons, the book has been embellished with a series of small wood engravings of Biblical subjects, plainly cut from a book and pasted in, it is believed, by Pepys himself, who was thus following a common custom of the time. The pages have also been decorated with rulings of lines done in red crayon, but they show no trace of having been numbered.