And for these reasons, we have been inclined to underestimate the importance of Pepys’ diary.  Francis Jeffrey, who wrote long ago about Pepys, evidently thought that he was an idle and unprofitable fellow and that the diary was too much given to mean and petty things.  But in reality the diary is an historical mine.  Even when Pepys plays upon the surface, he throws out facts that can be had nowhere else.  No one would venture to write of Restoration life without digging through his pages.  Pepys wrote in a confused shorthand, maybe against the eye of his wife, from whom he had reason to conceal his offenses.  The papers lay undeciphered until 1825, when a partial publication was made.  There were additions by subsequent editors until now it appears that the Wheatley text of 1893-1899 is final.  But ever since 1825, the diary has been judged to be of high importance in the understanding of the first decade of the Restoration.

If some of the weightier parts are somewhat dry, there are places in which a lighter show of personality is coincident with real historical data.  Foremost are the pages where Pepys goes to the theatre.

More than Charles II was restored in 1660.  Among many things of more importance than this worthless King, the theatre was restored.  Since the close of Elizabethan times it had been out of business.  More than thirty years before, Puritanism had snuffed out its candles and driven its fiddlers to the streets.  But Puritanism, in its turn, fell with the return of the Stuarts.  Pepys is a chief witness as to what kind of theatre it was that was set up in London about the year 1660.  It was far different from the Elizabethan theatre.  It came in from the Bankside and the fields to the north of the city and lodged itself on the better streets and squares.  It no longer patterned itself on the inn-yard, but was roofed against the rain.  The time had been when the theatre was cousin to the bear-pit.  They were ranged together on the Bankside and they sweat and smelled like congenial neighbors.  But these days are past.  Let Bartholomew Fair be as rowdy as it pleases, let acrobats and such loose fellows keep to Southwark, the theatre has risen in the world!  It has put on a wig, as it were, it has tied a ribbon to itself and has become fashionable.  And although it has taken on a few extra dissolute habits, they are of the genteelest kind and will make it feel at home in the upper circles.

But also the theatre introduced movable scenery.  There is an attempt toward elaboration of stage effect.  “To the King’s playhouse—­” says Pepys, “a good scene of a town on fire.”  Women take parts.  An avalanche of new plays descends on it.  Even the old plays that have survived are garbled to suit a change of taste.