The Pyramid and the Urn: The Life in Letters of a Restoration Squire - William Lawrence of Shurdington, 1636-97 (Biography, Letters & Diaries S.)

William Lawrence could be both irascible and malicious. He was also, in turns, often funny, affectionate, vulnerable and, ultimately, endearing. This is mainly his personal story where love of his wife, his son and his home are the keynotes and human frailty and failed ambition are the recurrent themes. The letters also span, and comment on, forty years of one of the most turbulent periods in British history - the first of them written in 1659 - the same year, coincidentally, as Samuel Pepys began his diary. William Lawrence's views on the political scene, in both Puritan and Restoration England, are often caustic. These are balanced by the entertaining letters describing, for instance, his neighbours in seventeenth-century Gloucestershire and his touching and affectionate letters to his family and friends. Comic and tragic elements interweave in this unique real-life story, giving an understanding of something of the origins of the eighteenth-century English novel. The letters lead from the irresponsibility of his youth, in Restoration London, through frustration and cruel turns of fate, in his middle years, to the tranquillity of his old age. In the last years of his life he laid out a family memorial garden in the formal style of the period. Symbolic ornaments, such as the pyramid and the urn, are described by Lawrence, and this rare full description of a garden of the time will be appreciated particularly by those interested in garden history. Lawrence never travels far himself but he writes to his brother in India, to a cousin with the army of King William of Orange in the Netherlands and to a cousin who was secretary to the Council of the Colony of Maryland. The book is fully illustrated, both by contemporary prints and portraits, and by the editor's drawings.