everywhere and to an unlimited extent.  There is no pose in the book either of good or bad, and it is one of the very few books of which such a statement could be made.  He has been accused of many things, but never of affectation.  The bad actions are qualified by regrets, and the disarmed critic feels that they have lost any element of tragedy which they might otherwise have had.  The good actions are usually spoiled by some selfish addendum which explains and at the same time debases them.  Surely the man who could do all this constantly through so many hundreds of pages, must be in his way a unique kind of genius, to have so clear an eye and so little self-deception.

The Diary is full of details, for he is the most curious man in the world.  One might apply to him the word catholicity if it were not far too big and dignified an epithet.  The catholicity of his mind is that of the Old Curiosity Shop.  The interest of the book is inexhaustible, because to him the whole world was just such a book.  His world was indeed

     So full of a number of things
     He was sure we should all be as happy as kings.

Like Chaucer’s Pardoner he was “meddlesome as a fly.”  Now he lights upon a dane’s skin hung in a church.  Again, upon a magic-lantern.  Yet again upon a traitor’s head, and the prospect of London in the distance.  He will drink four pints of Epsom water.  He will learn to whistle like a bird, and he will tell you a tale of a boy who was disinherited because he crowed like a cock.  He will walk across half the country to see anything new.  His heart is full of a great love of processions, raree-shows of every kind, and, above all, novelty.  His confession that the sight of the King touching for the evil gave him no pleasure because he had seen it before, applies to most things in his life.  For such a man, this world must indeed have been an interesting place.

We join him in well-nigh every meal he sits down to, from the first days when they lived so plainly, on to the greater times of the end, when he gives a dinner to his friends, which was “a better dinner than they understood or deserved.”  He delights in all the detail of the table.  The cook-maid, whose wages were L4 per annum, had no easy task to satisfy her fastidious master, and Mrs. Pepys must now and then rise at four in the morning to make mince-pies.  Any new kind of meat or drink especially delights him.  He finds ortolans to be composed of nothing but fat, and he often seems, in his thoughts on other nations, to have for his first point of view the sight of foreigners at dinner.  But this is only part of the insatiable and omnivorous interest in odds and ends which is everywhere apparent.  The ribbons he has seen at a wedding, the starving seamen who are becoming a danger to the nation, the drinking of wine with a toad in the glass, a lightning flash that melted fetters from the limbs of slaves, Harry’s chair (the latest curiosity of the drawing-rooms, whose arms rise and clasp you into it when you sit down), the new Messiah, who comes with a brazier of hot coals and proclaims the doom of England—­these, and a thousand other details, make up the furniture of this most miscellaneous mind.