Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/547

P E R P E R 521 15th October, on bail (see his letter, Bright, vol. vi. p. 169). He was, however, afraid of fresh attacks as late as Easter 1692 (Letter to Evelyn, Bright, vi. p. 173). It was about this time that he published his long-intended Memoirs of the Navy. He gave, as in former years, great attention to the government of Christ s Hospital, and especially to the mathematical foundation ; and he was concerned with the establishment of Sir William Boreman s mathematical .school at Greenwich. He was, too, a benefactor of his old school of St Paul s, and of Magdalene College. In the spring of 1700, being very ill with the breaking out of the wound caused by the operation of 1658, he removed to the house of his old clerk William Hewer, at Clapham, and, against the urgent advice of his doctors (Bright, Preface), gave himself up to indefatigable study, feeling that his health was restored by the change. He himself, however, on 7th August 1700, wrote in a charm ing letter l that ho was doing " nothing that will bear naming, and yet I am not, I think, idle ; for who can, that has so much of past and to come to think on as I have? And thinking, I take it, is working." And he speaks of himself in September as making several country excursions. He was, immediately after this, confined entirely to the house with his old disease of stone, and gradually failed. He bore his long and acute sufferings with extreme fortitude, and died, in reduced circumstances (though he claimed a balance of 28,007 2s l|d against the crown), on 26th May 1 703. He was buried by the side of his wife in St Olave s, Crutched Friars, London, on 5th June. His library of 3000 volumes, which he had collected with much labour and sacrifice, and which he would not allow to be divided, was bequeathed to Magdalene College. The last fact to be recorded of Pepys is that on 18th March 1884, two centuries after his official employment, a monument was unveiled in the church where he was buried to the "Clerk of the Acts and Secretary to the Admiralty" (Times, 19th March 1884). The importance of Pepys s Diary, historically speaking, may lie summed up by saying that without it the history of the court of Charles II. could not have been written. We do not, it is true, gain from it any information as to what was going on in the country. Utterly destitute of imagination or political knowledge, Pepys could only record the sights and the gossip that were evident to all. It is because he did record these, without hesitation or concealment, that from his Diary we can understand the brilliancy and wickedness of the court, as well as the social state and daily life of the bourgeois class. Viewed in another light, it is unique as the record of a mind formed of inconsistencies. To him especi ally would his own motto apply, "Mens cujusque, is cst quisque. " Probity in word and integrity in office, along with self-confessed mendacity and fraud ; modesty, with inordinate self-conceit ; inde pendence of mind, with the vulgarest striving after and exultation at the marks of respect which he receives as he rises in the world, and at little advantages gained over others; high - mindedness, with sordid spite ; dignity, with buffoonery ; strong common sense, with great superstition ; kindness, with brutality ; the eager pursuit of money, with liberality in spending it, such are a few of the more obvious contrasts. He gained his reputation by fair means, and yet was willing enough to lie in order to increase it ; he practised extreme respectability of deportment before the world, while he wor shipped the most abandoned of Charles s mistresses, and now and again gave loose rein to his own very indifferent morals ; and he combined with courage amid difficulties and devotion to duty in the face of almost certain death a personal poltroonery to which few men would care to confess. The best tribute to him as a man is that in his later years Evelyn became his firm and intimate friend, and that he died amid universal respect. Authorities. Diary (Bright s edition ; compared with which other editions are of slight value) ; Rev. J. Smith, Life, Journals, and Correspondence of Pepys (1841); Parliamentary History, vol. iv. ; Journals of the House of Commons ; Evelyn, Diary ; Wheatley, Samuel Pepys and the World he Lived in (1880) ; and articles in various magazines and reviews. (0. A.) PERA. See CONSTANTINOPLE, vol. vi. p. 306. PEILEA. See GILEAD, vol. x. p. 595. PEPiAK. See MALAY PENINSULA, vol. xv. p. 320 sq., and STRAITS SETTLEMENTS. 1 He carried on an active correspondence with literary i rieiids, among them being Dryden, Sloane, and Evelyn. PERCEVAL, AMAND-PIERRE CAUSSIN DE (1795-1871), Orientalist, was born at Paris, where his father was pro fessor of Arabic in the College de France, on 13th January 1795. In 1814 he went to Constantinople as a student interpreter, and afterwards travelled in Asiatic Turkey, spending a year with the Maronites in the Lebanon, and finally becoming dragoman at Aleppo. Returning to Paris, he became professor of vulgar Arabic in the school of living Oriental languages in 1821, and also professor of Arabic in the College de France in 1833. In 1849 he was elected to the Academy of Inscriptions. He died at Paris during the siege, 15th January 1871, regretted not only for his ripe scholarship but for the gentleness and modesty of a character which represented the best features of the old school of French savants. Caussin de Perceval published a useful Grammaire Arabe vulgaire, which passed through several editions (4th ed. 1858), and edited and enlarged Bocthor s Dictionnairc Fran ^ais- Arabe (3d ed. 1864) ; but his great reputation rests almost entirely on one book, the Essai sur Vhistoire des Arabcs (3 vols., Paris, 1847-48), in which the native traditions as to the early history of the Arabs, down to the death of Mohammed and the complete subjection of all the tribes to Islam, are brought together with wonderful industry and set forth with much learning and lucidity. One of the principal MS. sources used is the great Kitdb al-Aghdny, which has since been published in Egypt ; but no publication of texts can deprive the L ssai, which is now unhappily very scarce, of its value as a trustworthy guide through a tangled mass of tradition. PERCEVAL, SPENCER (1762-1812), prime minister of England from 1809 to 1812, was the second son of John, second earl of Egmont, and was born in Audley Square, Lon don, in November 1762. He was educated at Harrow and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated M.A. in 1781. He was called to the bar at Lincoln s Inn in 1786. A very able speech in connexion with a famous forgery case having drawn attention to his talents, his success was from that time rapid, and he was soon regarded as the leading counsel on the Midland circuit. Entering parlia ment for Northampton in April 1796, he distinguished himself by his speeches in support of the administration of Pitt. In 1801, on the formation of the Addington administration, he was appointed solicitor-general, and in 1802 he became attorney-general. An ardent opponent of Catholic emancipation, he delivered in 1807 a speech on the subject which helped to give the deathblow to the Grenville administration, upon which he became chancellor of the exchequer under the duke of Portland, whom in 1 809 he succeeded in the premiership. Notwithstanding that he had the assistance in the cabinet of no statesman of the first rank, he succeeded in retaining office till he was shot by an assassin, perhaps a madman, named Bel- lingham, in the lobby of the House of Commons, llth May 1812. Perceval will be chiefly remembered for his strenuous opposition to Catholic emancipation, an opposi tion due to a conscientious dread of the political evils that might result from it. He was a vigorous debater, specially excelling in replies, in which his thorough mastery of all the details of his subject gave him a great advantage. PERCH (Perm fluviatilis), a freshwater fish generally distributed over Europe, northern Asia, and North America, and so well known as to have been selected for the type of an entire family of spiny-rayed fishes, the Percidse, which is represented in European freshwaters by several other fishes such as the pope (Acerina cernua) and the pike-perch (Lucwperca). It inhabits rivers as well as lakes, but thrives best in waters with a depth of not less than 3 feet ; in large deep lakes it frequently descends to depths of 50 fathoms and more. It occurs in Scandinavia as far north as the 69th parallel, but does not extend to Iceland or any of the islands north of Europe. In the Alps it ascends to an altitude of 4000 feet. The shape of its body is well proportioned, but many XVIII. 66