of April of the year 1666:  “Thus ends this month; my wife in the country, myself full of pleasure and expence; in some trouble for my friends, and my Lord Sandwich, by the Parliament, and more for my eyes, which are daily worse and worse, that I dare not write or read almost anything.”  He is essentially a virtuoso who has been forced by circumstances into the necessity of being also a public man, and has developed on his own account an extraordinary passion for the observation of small and wayside things.  At the high table of those times, where Milton and Bunyan sit at the mighty feast of English literature, he is present also:  but he is under the table, a mischievous and yet observant child, loosening the neckerchiefs of those who are too drunk, and picking up scraps of conversation which he will retail outside.  There is something peculiarly pathetic in the whole picture.  One remembers Defoe, who for so many years lived in the reputation of honourable politics and in the odour of such sanctity as Robinson Crusoe could give, until the discovery of certain yellow papers revealed the base political treachery for which the great island story had been a kind of anodyne to conscience.  So Samuel Pepys would have passed for a great naval authority and an anxious friend of England when her foes were those of her own household, had he only been able to make up his mind to destroy these little manuscript volumes.

Why did he write them, one still asks?  Readers of Robert Browning’s poems, House and Shop, will remember the scorn which that poet pours upon any one who unlocks his heart to the general public.  And these narrations of Pepys’ are certainly of such a kind that if he intended them to be read by any public in any generation of England, he must be set down as unique among sane men.  Stevenson indeed considers that there was in the Diary a side glance at publication, but the proof which he adduces from the text does not seem sufficient to sustain so remarkable a freak of human nature, nor does the fact that on one occasion Pepys set about destroying all his papers except the Diary, appear to prove very much one way or another.  Stevenson calls it inconsistent and unreasonable in a man to write such a book and to preserve it unless he wanted it to be read.  But perhaps no writing of diaries is quite reasonable; and as for his desire to have it read by others than himself, we find that his Diary was so close a secret that he expresses regret for having mentioned it to Sir William Coventry.  No other man ever heard of it in Pepys’ lifetime, “it not being necessary, nor maybe convenient, to have it known.”