Reading Pepys is thus like reading Montaigne, whose cheery scepticism his revelations recall.  But Pepys has all the advantage of the man living in the busiest world over the recluse in that famed library, with the mottoes on the wall.  Montaigne wrote in a retired and contemplative home, viewing life, as Osman Digna has viewed strife, “from afar,” almost safe from the shots of fortune.  But Pepys writes day by day, like a war correspondent, in the thick of the battle; his head “full of business,” as he declares; his heart full of many desires, many covetings, much pride in matters that look small enough.  He notes how, by chewing tobacco, Mr. Chetwynde, who was consumptive, became very fat.  He remarks how a board fell, and the dust powdered the ladies’ heads at the play, “which made good sport.”  He records every venison-pasty, every flagon of wine, every pretty wench whom he encountered in his march through his youth towards the vault in St. Olave’s.  He is vexed with Mrs. Pepys and troubled by “my aunt’s base ugly humours.”  He is “full of repentance,” like the Bad Man in the Ethics, and thinks how much he is addicted to expense and pleasure, “so that now I can hardly reclaim myself.”  He interests himself in Dr. Williams’s remarkable dog, which not only killed cats, but buried them with punctilious obsequies, never leaving the tip of puss’s tail out of the ground.  Then he goes to the play, “after swearing to my wife that I would never go to the play without her.”  He remembers one night that he passed “with the greatest epicurism of sleep,” because he was often disturbed, and so got out of sleeping more conscious enjoyment.  Now he sleeps what Socrates calls the sweetest slumber of all, if it be but dreamless, or, somewhere, he enjoys all new experience, with the lusty appetite of old.

INVOLUNTARY BAILEES.

Lord Tennyson is probably the most extensive Involuntary Bailee at present living.  The term “Involuntary Bailee” may or may not be a correct piece of legal terminology; at all events, it sounds very imposing, and can be easily explained.

An Involuntary Bailee is a person to whom people (generally unknown to him) send things which he does not wish to receive, but which they are anxious to have returned.  Most of us in our humble way are or have been Involuntary Bailees.  When some one you meet at dinner recommends to your notice a book (generally of verse), and kindly insists on sending it to you next day by post as a loan, you are an Involuntary Bailee.  You have the wretched book in your possession; no inducement would make you read it, and to pack it up and send it back again requires a piece of string, energy, brown paper, and stamps enough to defray the postage.  Now, surely no casual acquaintance or neighbour for an hour at a dinner-party has any right thus to make demands on a man’s energy, money, time, brown paper, string, and other capital and commodities.