Thus his religion gave him no escape from the world.  He was a man wholly governed by self-interest and the verdict of society, and his religion was simply the celestial version of these motives.  He has conscience enough to restrain him from damaging excesses, and to keep him within the limits of the petty vices and paying virtues of a comfortable man—­a conscience which is a cross between cowardice and prudence.  We are constantly asking why he restrained himself so much as he did.  It seems as if it would have been so easy for him simply to do the things which he unblushingly confesses he would like to do.  It is a question to which there is no answer, either in his case or in any other man’s.  Why are all of us the very complex and unaccountable characters that we are?

Pepys was a pagan man in a pagan time, if ever there was such a man.  The deepest secret of him is his intense vitality.  Here, on the earth, he is thoroughly alive, and puts his whole heart into most of his actions.  He is always in the superlative mood, finding things either the best or the worst that “he ever saw in all his life.”  His great concern is to be merry, and he never outgrows the crudest phases of this desire, but carries the monkey tricks of a boy into mature age.  He will draw his merriment from any source.  He finds it “very pleasant to hear how the old cavaliers talk and swear.”  At the Blue Ball, “we to dancing, and then to a supper of French dishes, which yet did not please me, and then to dance and sing; and mighty merry we were till about eleven or twelve at night, with mighty great content in all my company, and I did, as I love to do, enjoy myself.”  “This day my wife made it appear to me that my late entertainment of this week cost me above L12, an expence which I am almost ashamed of, though it is but once in a great while, and is the end for which, in the most part, we live, to have such a merry day once or twice in a man’s life.”

The only darkening element in his merriment is his habit of examining it too anxiously.  So greedy is he of delight that he cannot let himself go, but must needs be measuring the extent to which he has achieved his desire.  Sometimes he finds himself “merry,” but at other times only “pretty merry.”  And there is one significant confession in connection with some performance of a favourite play, “and indeed it is good, though wronged by my over great expectations, as all things else are.”  This is one of the very few touches of anything approaching to cynicism which are to be found in his writings.  His greed of merriment overleaps itself, and the confession of that is the deepest note in all his music.

Thus all the avenues leading beyond the earth were blocked.  Other men escape along the lines of kindliness, love of friends, art, poetry, or religion.  In all these avenues he walks or dances, but they lead him nowhere.  At the bars he stands, an absolute worldling and pagan, full of an insatiable curiosity and an endless hunger and thirst.  There is no touch of eternity upon his soul:  his universe is Vanity Fair.