In regard to outward details there are many interesting little points of contact between the Diary and the Pilgrims Progress.  We hear of Pepys purchasing Foxe’s Book of Martyrs; Bartholomew and Sturbridge Fairs come in for their own share of notice; nor is there wanting a description of such a cage as Christian and Faithful were condemned to in Vanity Fair.  Justice Keelynge, the judge who condemned Bunyan, is mentioned on several occasions by Pepys, very considerably to his disadvantage.  But by far the most interesting point that the two have in common is found in that passage which is certainly the gem of the whole Diary.  Bunyan, in the second part of the Pilgrim’s Progress, introduces a shepherd boy who sings very sweetly upon the Delectable Mountains.  It is the most beautiful and idyllic passage in the whole allegory, and has become classical in English literature.  Yet Pepys’ passage will match it for simple beauty.  He rises with his wife a little before four in the morning to make ready for a journey into the country in the neighbourhood of Epsom.  There, as they walk upon the Downs, they come “where a flock of sheep was; and the most pleasant and innocent sight that ever I saw in my life.  We found a shepherd and his little boy reading, far from any houses or sight of people, the Bible to him; so I made the boy read to me, which he did....  He did content himself mightily in my liking his boy’s reading, and did bless God for him, the most like one of the old patriarchs that ever I saw in my life, and it brought those thoughts of the old age of the world in my mind for two or three days after.”

Such is some slight conception, gathered from a few of many thousands of quaint and sparkling revelations of this strange character.  Over against the “ingenious dreamer,” Bunyan, here is a man who never dreams.  He is the realist, pure and unsophisticated; and the stray touches of pathos, on which here and there one chances in his Diary, are written without the slightest attempt at sentiment, or any other thought than that they are plain matters of fact.  He might have stood for this prototype of many of Bunyan’s characters.  Now he is Mr. Worldly Wiseman, now Mr. By-ends, and Mr. Hold-the-World; and taken altogether, with all his good and bad qualities, he is a fairly typical citizen of Vanity Fair.

There are indeed in his character exits towards idealism and possibilities of it, but their promise is never fulfilled.  There is, for instance, his kindly good-nature.  That quality was the one and all-atoning virtue of the times of Charles the Second, and it was supposed to cover a multitude of sins.  Yet Charles the Second’s was a reign of constant persecution, and of unspeakable selfishness in high places.  Pepys persecutes nobody, and yet some touch of unblushing selfishness mars every kindly thing he does.  If he sends a haunch of venison to his mother, he lets you know that it was far too bad for his own table.