It is doubtful whether any of Bunyan’s contemporaries had so strong a human interest attaching to his person and his work as Samuel Pepys.  There is indeed something in common to the two men,—­little or nothing of character, but a certain naivete and sincerity of writing, which makes them remind one of each other many times.  All the more because of this does the contrast between the spirit of the two force itself upon every reader; and if we should desire to find a typical pagan to match Bunyan’s spirituality and idealism, it would be difficult to go past Samuel Pepys.

There were, as everybody knows, two famous diarists of the Restoration period, Pepys and Evelyn.  It is interesting to look at the portraits of the two men side by side.  Evelyn’s face is anxious and austere, suggesting the sort of stuff of which soldiers or saints are made.  Pepys is a voluptuous figure, in the style of Charles the Second, with regular and handsome features below his splendid wig, and eyes that are both keen and heavy, penetrating and luxurious.  These two men (who, in the course of their work, had to compare notes on several occasions, and between whom we have the record of more than one meeting) were among the most famous gossips of the world.  But Evelyn’s gossip is a succession of solemnities compared with the racy scandal, the infantile and insatiable curiosity, and the incredible frankness of the pagan diarist.

Look at his face again, and you will find it impossible not to feel a certain amount of surprise.  Of all the unlikely faces with which history has astonished the readers of books, there are none more surprising than those of three contemporaries in the later seventeenth century.  Claverhouse, with his powerful character and indomitable will, with his Titanic daring and relentless cruelty, has the face of a singularly beautiful young girl.  Judge Jeffreys, whose delight in blood was only equalled by the foulness and extravagance of his profanity, looks in his picture the very type of spiritual wistfulness.  Samuel Pepys, whose large oval eyes and clear-cut profile suggest a somewhat voluptuous and very fastidious aristocrat, was really a man of the people, sharp to a miracle in all the detail of the humblest kind of life, and apparently unable to keep from exposing himself to scandal in many sorts of mean and vulgar predicament.

Since the deciphering and publication of his Diary, a great deal has been written concerning it.  The best accounts of it are Henry B. Wheatley’s Samuel Pepys and the World he Lived in, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s little essay in his Short Studies of Men and Books.  The object of the present lecture is not to give any general account of the time and its public events, upon which the Diary touches at a thousand points, but rather to set the spirit of this man in contrast with that of John Bunyan, which we have just considered.  The men are very typical, and any adequate conception