Although Jeremiah Mount receives only passing notice in the celebrated diary of Samuel Pepys, in Jem's own memoirs Sam figures significantly and large -- not as a fellow clerk in Oliver Cromwell's government but as an ill-natured, galling colleague and measly mouse of a man who sets the professionally envious Jem on a hapless path of revenge. Their personal destinies criss-crossing to wildly ironic ends, Jem (and Sam) not only pursue worldly successes and their erotic whims in a bustling, boisterous city of London. They also survive war, rebellion, pestilence, and the Great Fire. Less fortunately, in his final bid for literary fame, Jem falls into a fatal vat of boiling ink, but not before recounting the adventures in this rollicking novel's marvelous fabrication of a man and his times.