ABSTRACT
In 19rr Magdalene was one of Cambridge's smallest colleges; about twenty-five undergraduates entered each year. Its buildings preserved the atmosphere of the college's monastic origins; they were modest, "plain in thy neatness" -except for the Pepysian Library, with its elegant neoclassical facade. On a red cartouche over its central arch, painted in black letters on a gold ribbon, was Pepys' motto from Cicero: Mens cujusque is est quisque (One's mind is what one is). Richards said it was "the prime utterance point of what may well claim to be the most inexhaustibly enheartening facade in Cambridge." Pepys chose the motto for the suggestive links between Neoplatonist metaphysics, Ciceronian classicism, and St. Paul; he entered the college in r65r, "when Cambridge and Magdalene had been full of very sensible and exciting Neo-Platonists." In 1975 Richards took the Latin passage for an exercise in multiple translation. One attempt was: "Our minds are our true selves," that is, the mind is the determining factor in the personality. Each of Richards' versions drew further implications from the text, and the last placed it within Pepys' personal situation, that of a retired secretary of the Admiralty looking back upon his career. In a similar retrospective mood, Richards read his remarks in Pepys' honor at a Magdalene dinner sixty-four years after he had entered the college. For him the motto had been "an invitation to endless reflection" and still spoke to him of "what is within," the library above
and behind it, and the inner life. 1 The bookplate that Richards designed for his personal library and donated to Magdalene bears the image of an eye and a motto from Plotinus: Look Within.2
