But the immortal part of Pepys is undoubtedly his Diary.  Among others of the innumerable curious interests which this man cultivated was that of studying the secret ciphers which had been invented and used by literary people in the past.  From his knowledge of these he was enabled to invent a cipher of his own, or rather to adopt one which he altered somewhat to serve his uses.  Having found this sufficiently secret code, he was now able to gratify his immense interest in himself and his inordinate personal vanity by writing an intimate narrative of his own life.  The Diary covers nine and a half years in all, from January 1660 to May 1669.  For nearly a century and a half it lay dead and silent, until Rev. J. Smith, with infinite diligence and pains, discovered the key to it, and wrote his translation.  A later translation has been made by Rev. Mynors Bright, which includes some passages by the judgment of the former translator considered unnecessary or inadvisable.

Opinions differ as to the wisdom, and indeed the morality, of forcing upon the public ear the accidentally discovered secrets which a dead man had guarded so carefully.  There is, of course, the possibility that, as some think, Pepys desired that posterity should have the complete record in all its frankness and candour.  If this be so, one can only say that the wish is evidence of a morbid and unbalanced mind.  It seems much more probable that he wrote the Diary for the luxury of reading it to himself, always intending to destroy it before his death.  But a piece of work so intimate as this is, in a sense, a living part of the man who creates it, and one can well imagine him putting off the day of its destruction, and grudging that it should perish with all its power of awakening old chords of memory and revitalising buried years.  For his own part he was no squeamish moralist and if it were only for his own eyes he would enjoy passages which the more fastidious public might judge differently.

So it comes to pass that this amazing omnium gatherum of a book is among the most living of all the gifts of the past to the present, telling everything and telling it irresistibly.  His hat falls through a hole, and he writes down all about the incident as faithfully as he describes the palace of the King of France, and the English war with Holland.  His nature is amazingly complicated, and yet our judgment of it is simplified by his passion for telling everything, no matter how discreditable or how ignoble the detail may be.  He is a great man and a great statesman, and he is the liveliest of our English crickets on the hearth.  One set of excerpts would present him as the basest, another set as the pleasantest and kindliest of men; and always without any exception he is refreshing by his intense and genial interest in the facts of the world.  Of the many summaries of himself which he has given us, none is more characteristic than the following, with which he closes the month