Under the category of his amusements, physic must be included; for, like other egoists, he was immensely interested in his real or imaginary ailments, and in the means which were taken to cure them.  On some days he will sit all day long taking physic.  He derives an immense amount of amusement from the process of doctoring himself, and still more from writing down in all their detail both his symptoms and their treatment.  His pharmacopoeia is by no means scientific, for he includes within it charms which will cure one of anything, and he always keeps a hare’s foot by him, and will sometimes tell of troubles which came to him because he had forgotten it.

He is constantly passing the shrewdest of judgments upon men and things, or retailing them from the lips of others.  “Sir Ellis Layton is, for a speech of forty words, the wittiest man that ever I knew in my life, but longer he is nothing.”  “Mighty merry to see how plainly my Lord and Povy do abuse one another about their accounts, each thinking the other a fool, and I thinking they were not either of them, in that point, much in the wrong.”  “How little merit do prevail in the world, but only favour; and that, for myself, chance without merit brought me in; and that diligence only keeps me so, and will, living as I do among so many lazy people that the diligent man becomes necessary, that they cannot do anything without him.”  “To the Cocke-pitt where I hear the Duke of Albemarle’s chaplain make a simple sermon:  among other things, reproaching the imperfection of humane learning, he cried, ’All our physicians cannot tell what an ague is, and all our arithmetique is not able to number the days of a man’—­which, God knows, is not the fault of arithmetique, but that our understandings reach not the thing.”  “The blockhead Albemarle hath strange luck to be loved, though he be, and every man must know it, the heaviest man in the world, but stout and honest to his country.”  “He advises me in what I write to him, to be as short as I can, and obscure.”  “But he do tell me that the House is in such a condition that nobody can tell what to make of them, and, he thinks, they were never in before; that everybody leads and nobody follows.”  “My Lord Middleton did come to-day, and seems to me but a dull, heavy man; but he is a great soldier, and stout, and a needy Lord.”  A man who goes about the world making remarks of that kind, would need a cipher in which to write them down.  His world is everything to him, and he certainly makes the most of it so far as observation and remark are concerned.

If Pepys’ curiosity and infinitely varied shrewdness and observation may be justly regarded as phenomenal, the complexity of his moral character is no less amazing.  He is full of industry and ambition, reading for his favourite book Bacon’s Faber Fortunae, “which I can never read too often.”  He is “joyful beyond myself that I cannot express it, to see, that as I do take pains, so God blesses me, and has sent me masters that do observe that I take pains.”  Again he is “busy till night blessing myself mightily to see what a deal of business goes off a man’s hands when he stays at it.”  Colonel Birch tells him “that he knows him to be a man of the old way of taking pains.”