Why, then, did he write it?  Why does anybody write a diary?  Probably the answer nearest to the truth will be that every one finds himself interesting, and some people have so keen an interest in themselves that it becomes a passion, clamorous to be gratified.  Now as Bacon tells us, “Writing maketh an exact man,” and the writing of diaries reduces to the keenest vividness our own impressions of experience and thoughts about things.  Pepys was, above all other men, interested in himself.  He was intensely in love with himself.  The beautiful, jealous, troublesome, and yet inevitable Mrs. Pepys was but second in her husband’s affections after all.  He was his own wife.  One remembers fashionable novels of the time of Evelina or the Mysteries of Udolpho, and recollects how the ladies there speak lover-like of their diaries, and, when writing them, feel themselves always in the best possible company.  For Pepys, his Diary does not seem to have been so much a refuge from daily cares and worries, nor a preparation for the luxury of reading it in his old age, as an indulgence of intense and poignant pleasure in the hour of writing.

His interest in himself was quite extraordinary.  When his library was collected and his books bound and gilded they were doubtless a treasured possession of which he was hugely proud.  But this was not so much a possession as it was a kind of alter ego, a fragment of his living self, hidden away from all eyes but his own.  No trifle in his life is too small for record.  He cannot change his seat in the office from one side of the fireplace to another without recording it.  The gnats trouble him at an inn in the country.  His wig takes fire and crackles, and he is mighty merry about it until he discovers that it is his own wig that is burning and not somebody else’s.  He visits the ships, and, remembering former days, notes down without a blush the sentence, “Poor ship, that I have been twice merry in.”  Any one could have written the Diary, so far as intellectual or even literary power is concerned, though perhaps few would have chosen precisely Pepys’ grammar in which to express themselves.  But nobody else that ever lived could have written it with such sheer abandonment and frankness.  He has a positive talent, nay, a genius for self-revelation, for there must be a touch of genius in any man who is able to be absolutely true.  Other men have struggled hard to gain sincerity, and when it is gained the struggle has made it too conscious to be perfectly sincere.  Pepys, with utter unconsciousness, is sincere even in his insincerities.  Some of us do not know ourselves and our real motives well enough to attempt any formal statement of them.  Others of us may suspect ourselves, but would die before we would confess our real motives even to ourselves, and would fiercely deny them if any other person accused us of them.  But this man’s barriers are all down.  There is no reserve, but frankness