There on the left of Gibbon is my fine edition (Lord Braybrooke’s) of Pepys’ Diary.  That is, in truth, the greatest autobiography in our language, and yet it was not deliberately written as such.  When Mr. Pepys jotted down from day to day every quaint or mean thought which came into his head he would have been very much surprised had any one told him that he was doing a work quite unique in our literature.  Yet his involuntary autobiography, compiled for some obscure reason or for private reference, but certainly never meant for publication, is as much the first in that line of literature as Boswell’s book among biographies or Gibbon’s among histories.

As a race we are too afraid of giving ourselves away ever to produce a good autobiography.  We resent the charge of national hypocrisy, and yet of all nations we are the least frank as to our own emotions—­especially on certain sides of them.  Those affairs of the heart, for example, which are such an index to a man’s character, and so profoundly modify his life—­what space do they fill in any man’s autobiography?  Perhaps in Gibbon’s case the omission matters little, for, save in the instance of his well-controlled passion for the future Madame Neckar, his heart was never an organ which gave him much trouble.  The fact is that when the British author tells his own story he tries to make himself respectable, and the more respectable a man is the less interesting does he become.  Rousseau may prove himself a maudlin degenerate.  Cellini may stand self-convicted as an amorous ruffian.  If they are not respectable they are thoroughly human and interesting all the same.

The wonderful thing about Mr. Pepys is that a man should succeed in making himself seem so insignificant when really he must have been a man of considerable character and attainments.  Who would guess it who read all these trivial comments, these catalogues of what he had for dinner, these inane domestic confidences—­all the more interesting for their inanity!  The effect left upon the mind is of some grotesque character in a play, fussy, self-conscious, blustering with women, timid with men, dress-proud, purse-proud, trimming in politics and in religion, a garrulous gossip immersed always in trifles.  And yet, though this was the day-by-day man, the year-by-year man was a very different person, a devoted civil servant, an eloquent orator, an excellent writer, a capable musician, and a ripe scholar who accumulated 3000 volumes—­a large private library in those days—­and had the public spirit to leave them all to his University.  You can forgive old Pepys a good deal of his philandering when you remember that he was the only official of the Navy Office who stuck to his post during the worst days of the Plague.  He may have been—­indeed, he assuredly was—­a coward, but the coward who has sense of duty enough to overcome his cowardice is the most truly brave of mankind.