contemporary light upon the journal, and Pepys was plunged

for ever in social and political disgrace. We can trace the
growth of his terrors by two facts. In 1660, while the Diary

was still in its youth, he tells about it, as a matter of
course, to a lieutenant in the navy; but in 1669, when it was

already near an end, he could have bitten his tongue out, as
the saying is, because he had let slip his secret to one so

grave and friendly as Sir William Coventry. And from two
other facts I think we may infer that he had entertained,

even if he had not acquiesced in, the thought of a far-
distant publicity. The first is of capital importance: the

Diary was not destroyed. The second - that he took unusual
precautions to confound the cipher in "rogueish" passages -

proves, beyond question, that he was thinking of some other
reader besides himself. Perhaps while his friends were

admiring the "greatness of his behaviour" at the approach of
death, he may have had a twinkling hope of immortality. MENS

CUJUSQUE IS EST QUISQUE, said his chosen motto; and, as he
had stamped his mind with every crook and foible in the pages

of the Diary, he might feel that what he left behind him was
indeed himself. There is perhaps no other instance so

remarkable of the desire of man for publicity and an enduring
name. The greatness of his life was open, yet he longed to

communicate its smallness also; and, while contemporaries
bowed before him, he must buttonhole posterity with the news

that his periwig was once alive with nits. But this thought,
although I cannot doubt he had it, was neither his first nor

his deepest; it did not colour one word that he wrote; and
the Diary, for as long as he kept it, remained what it was

when he began, a private pleasure for himself. It was his
bosom secret; it added a zest to all his pleasures; he lived

in and for it, and might well write these solemn words, when
he closed that confidant for ever: "And so I betake myself to

that course which is almost as much as to see myself go into
the grave; for which, and all the discomforts that will

accompany my being blind, the good God prepare me."
A LIBERAL GENIUS.

Pepys spent part of a certain winter Sunday, when he had
taken physic, composing "a song in praise of a liberal genius

(such as I take my own to be) to all studies and pleasures."
The song was unsuccessful, but the Diary is, in a sense, the

very song that he was seeking; and his portrait by Hales, so
admirably reproduced in Mynors Bright's edition, is a

confirmation of the Diary. Hales, it would appear, had known
his business; and though he put his sitter to a deal of

trouble, almost breaking his neck "to have the portrait full
of shadows," and draping him in an Indian gown hired

expressly for the purpose, he was preoccupied about no merely
picturesque effects, but to portray the essence of the man.

Whether we read the picture by the Diary or the Diary by the
picture, we shall at least agree that Hales was among the

number of those who can "surprise the manners in the face."
Here we have a mouth pouting, moist with desires; eyes

greedy, protuberant, and yet apt for weeping too; a nose
great alike in character and dimensions; and altogether a

most fleshly, melting countenance. The face is attractive by
its promise of reciprocity. I have used the word GREEDY, but

the reader must not suppose that he can change it for that
closely kindred one of HUNGRY, for there is here no

aspiration, no waiting for better things, but an animal joy
in all that comes. It could never be the face of an artist;

it is the face of a VIVEUR - kindly, pleased and pleasing,
protected from excess and upheld in contentment by the

shifting versatility of his desires. For a single desire is
more rightly to be called a lust; but there is health in a

variety, where one may balance and control another.
The whole world, town or country, was to Pepys a garden of

Armida. Wherever he went, his steps were winged with the
most eager expectation; whatever he did, it was done with the

most lively pleasure. An insatiable curiosity in all the
shows of the world and all the secrets of knowledge, filled

him brimful of the longing to travel, and supported him in
the toils of study. Rome was the dream of his life; he was

never happier than when he read or talked of the Eternal
City. When he was in Holland, he was "with child" to see any

strange thing. Meeting some friends and singing with them in
a palace near the Hague, his pen fails him to express his

passion of delight, "the more so because in a heaven of
pleasure and in a strange country." He must go to see all

famous executions. He must needs visit the body of a
murdered man, defaced "with a broad wound," he says, "that

makes my hand now shake to write of it." He learned to
dance, and was "like to make a dancer." He learned to sing,

and walked about Gray's Inn Fields "humming to myself (which
is now my constant practice) the trillo." He learned to play

the lute, the flute, the flageolet, and the theorbo, and it
was not the fault of his intention if he did not learn the

harpsichord or the spinet. He learned to compose songs, and
burned to give forth "a scheme and theory of music not yet

ever made in the world." When he heard "a fellow whistle
like a bird exceeding well," he promised to return another

day and give an angel for a lesson in the art. Once, he
writes, "I took the Bezan back with me, and with a brave gale

and tide reached up that night to the Hope, taking great
pleasure in learning the seamen's manner of singing when they

sound the depths." If he found himself rusty in his Latin
grammar, he must fall to it like a schoolboy. He was a

member of Harrington's Club till its dissolution, and of the
Royal Society before it had received the name. Boyle's

HYDROSTATICS was "of infinite delight" to him, walking in
Barnes Elms. We find him comparing Bible concordances, a

captious judge of sermons, deep in Descartes and Aristotle.
We find him, in a single year, studying timber and the

measurement of timber; tar and oil, hemp, and the process of
preparing cordage; mathematics and accounting; the hull and

the rigging of ships from a model; and "looking and improving
himself of the (naval) stores with" - hark to the fellow! -

"great delight." His familiar spirit of delight was not the
same with Shelley's; but how true it was to him through life!

He is only copying something, and behold, he "takes great
pleasure to rule the lines, and have the capital words wrote

with red ink;" he has only had his coal-cellar emptied and
cleaned, and behold, "it do please him exceedingly." A hog's

harslett is "a piece of meat he loves." He cannot ride home
in my Lord Sandwich's coach, but he must exclaim, with

breathless gusto, "his noble, rich coach." When he is bound
for a supper party, he anticipates a "glut of pleasure."

When he has a new watch, "to see my childishness," says he,
"I could not forbear carrying it in my hand and seeing what

o'clock it was an hundred times." To go to Vauxhall, he
says, and "to hear the nightingales and other birds, hear

fiddles, and there a harp and here a Jew's trump, and here
laughing, and there fine people walking, is mighty

divertising." And the nightingales, I take it, were
particularly dear to him; and it was again "with great

pleasure that he paused to hear them as he walked to
Woolwich, while the fog was rising and the April sun broke

through.
He must always be doing something agreeable, and, by

preference, two agreeable things at once. In his house he
had a box of carpenter's tools, two dogs, an eagle, a canary,

and a blackbird that whistled tunes, lest, even in that full
life, he should chance upon an empty moment. If he had to