written in such an unintelligible cipher, locked nightly with its little key, and hidden in some secure place.  When at last the writing was deciphered, there came forth upon us, from the august and honourable state in which the Navy Commissioner had lain so long, this flood of small talk, the greatest curiosity known to English literature.  Other men than Pepys have suffered in reputation from the yapping of dogs and the barn-door cackle that attacked their memories.  England blushed as she heard the noise when the name of Carlyle became the centre of such commotion.  But if Samuel Pepys has suffered in the same way he has no one to thank for it but himself; for, if his own hand-writing had not revealed it, no one could possibly have guessed it from the facts of his public career.  Yet what a rare show it is, that multitude of queer little human interests that intermingle with the talk about great things!  It may have been quite wrong to translate it, and undoubtedly much of it was disreputable enough for any man to write, yet it will never cease to be read; nor will England cease to be glad that it was translated, so long as the charm of history is doubled by touches of strange imagination and confessions of human frailty.

Pepys’ connection with literature is that rather of a virtuoso than of a student in the strict sense of the term.  He projected a great History of the Navy, which might have immortalised him in a very different fashion from that of the immortality which the Diary has achieved.  But his life was crowded with business and its intervals with pleasures.  The weakness of his eyes also militated against any serious contribution to literature, and instead of the History, for which he had gathered much material and many manuscripts, he gave us only the little volume entitled Memoirs of the Navy, which, however, shows a remarkable grasp of his subject, and of all corresponding affairs, such as could only have been possessed by a man of unusually thorough knowledge of his business.  He collected what was for his time a splendid library, consisting of some three thousand volumes, now preserved in his College (Magdalene College, Cambridge), very carefully arranged and catalogued.  We read much of this library while it is accumulating—­much more about the mahogany cases in which the books were to stand than about the books themselves, or his own reading of them.  The details of their arrangement were very dear to his curious mind.  He tells us that where the books would not fit exactly to the shelves, but were smaller than the space, he had little gilded stilts made, adjusted to the size of each book, and placed under the volumes, which they lifted to the proper height.  Little time can have been left over for the study of at least the stiffer works in that library, although there are many notes which show that he was in some sense a reader, and that books served the same purpose as events and personalities in leading him up and down the byways of what he always found to be a curious and interesting world.