In some respects Mr. Pepys reminds one of a type that is now commoner in Scotland, I fancy, than elsewhere.  He himself seems at one time to have taken the view that he was of Scottish descent.  None of the authorities, however, will admit this, and there is apparently no doubt that he belonged to an old Cambridgeshire family that had come down in the world, his father having dwindled into a London tailor.  In temperament, however, he seems to me to have been more Scottish than the very Scottish Boswell.  He led a double life with the same simplicity of heart.  He was Scottish in the way in which he lived with one eye on the “lassies” and the other on “the meenister.”  He was notoriously respectable, notoriously hard-working, a judge of sermons, fond of the bottle, cautious, thrifty.  He had all the virtues of a K.C.B.  He was no scapegrace or scallywag such as you might find nowadays crowing over his sins in Chelsea.  He lived, so far as the world was concerned, in the complete starch of rectitude.  He was a pillar of Society, and whatever age he had been born in, he would have accepted its orthodoxy.  He was as grave a man as Holy Willie.  Stevenson has commented on the gradual decline of his primness in the later years of the Diary.  “His favourite ejaculation, ‘Lord!’ occurs,” he declares, “but once that I have observed in 1660, never in ’61, twice in ’62, and at least five times in ’63; after which the ‘Lords’ may be said to pullulate like herrings, with here and there a solitary ‘damned,’ as it were a whale among the shoal.”  As a matter of fact, Mr. Pepys’s use of the expression “Lord!” has been greatly exaggerated, especially by the parodists.  His primness, if that is the right word, never altogether deserted him.  We discover this even in the story of his relations with women.  In 1665, for instance, he writes with surprised censoriousness of Mrs. Penington: 

There we drank and laughed [he relates], and she willingly suffered me to put my hand in her bosom very wantonly, and keep it there long.  Which methought was very strange, and I looked upon myself as a man mightily deceived in a lady, for I could not have thought she could have suffered it by her former discourse with me; so modest she seemed and I know not what.

It is a sad world for idealists.

Mr. Pepys’s Puritanism, however, was something less than Mr. Pepys.  It was but a pair of creaking Sunday boots on the feet of a pagan.  Mr. Pepys was an appreciator of life to a degree that not many Englishmen have been since Chaucer.  He was a walking appetite.  And not an entirely ignoble appetite either.  He reminds one in some respects of the poet in Browning’s “How it strikes a Contemporary,” save that he had more worldly success.  One fancies him with the same inquisitive ferrule on the end of his stick, the same “scrutinizing hat,” the same eye for the bookstall and “the man who slices lemon into drink.”  “If any cursed a woman, he took note.”  Browning’s poet, however, apparently “took note” on behalf of a higher power.  It is difficult to imagine Mr. Pepys sending his Diary to the address of the Recording Angel.  Rather, the Diary is the soliloquy of an egoist, disinterested and daring as a bad boy’s reverie over the fire.