But the one amazing thing which will never be explained about Pepys is what on earth induced him to go to the incredible labour of writing down in shorthand cipher not only all the trivialities of his life, but even his own very gross delinquencies which any other man would have been only too glad to forget.  The Diary was kept for about ten years, and was abandoned because the strain upon his eyes of the crabbed shorthand was helping to destroy his sight.  I suppose that he became so familiar with it that he wrote it and read it as easily as he did ordinary script.  But even so, it was a huge labour to compile these books of strange manuscript.  Was it an effort to leave some memorial of his own existence to single him out from all the countless sons of men?  In such a case he would assuredly have left directions in somebody’s care with a reference to it in the deed by which he bequeathed his library to Cambridge.  In that way he could have ensured having his Diary read at any date he chose to name after his death.  But no allusion to it was left, and if it had not been for the ingenuity and perseverance of a single scholar the dusty volumes would still lie unread in some top shelf of the Pepysian Library.  Publicity, then, was not his object.  What could it have been?  The only alternative is reference and self-information.  You will observe in his character a curious vein of method and order, by which he loved, to be for ever estimating his exact wealth, cataloguing his books, or scheduling his possessions.  It is conceivable that this systematic recording of his deeds—­even of his misdeeds—­was in some sort analogous, sprung from a morbid tidiness of mind.  It may be a weak explanation, but it is difficult to advance another one.

One minor point which must strike the reader of Pepys is how musical a nation the English of that day appear to have been.  Every one seems to have had command of some instrument, many of several.  Part-singing was common.  There is not much of Charles the Second’s days which we need envy, but there, at least, they seem to have had the advantage of us.  It was real music, too—­music of dignity and tenderness—­with words which were worthy of such treatment.  This cult may have been the last remains of those mediaeval pre-Reformation days when the English Church choirs were, as I have read somewhere, the most famous in Europe.  A strange thing this for a land which in the whole of last century has produced no single master of the first rank!

What national change is it which has driven music from the land?  Has life become so serious that song has passed out of it?  In Southern climes one hears poor folk sing for pure lightness of heart.  In England, alas, the sound of a poor man’s voice raised in song means only too surely that he is drunk.  And yet it is consoling to know that the germ of the old powers is always there ready to sprout forth if they be nourished and cultivated.  If our cathedral choirs were the best in the old Catholic days, it is equally true, I believe, that our orchestral associations are now the best in Europe.  So, at least, the German papers said on the occasion of the recent visit of a north of England choir.  But one cannot read Pepys without knowing that the general musical habit is much less cultivated now than of old.