en in such an unintelligible cipher, locked nightly with
its little key, and hidden in some secure place. When at last the
writing was deciphered, there came forth upon us, from the august and
honourable state in which the Navy Commissioner had lain so long, this
flood of small talk, the greatest curiosity known to English literature.
Other men than Pepys have suffered in reputation from the yapping of
dogs and the barn-door cackle that attacked their memories. England
blushed as she heard the noise when the name of Carlyle became the
centre of such commotion. But if Samuel Pepys has suffered in the same
way he has no one to thank for it but himself; for, if his own
hand-writing had not revealed it, no one could possibly have guessed
it from the facts of his public career. Yet what a rare show it is, that
multitude of queer little human interests that intermingle with the talk
about great things! It may have been quite wrong to translate it, and
undoubtedly much of it was disreputable enough for any man to write, yet
it will never cease to be read; nor will England cease to be glad that
it was translated, so long as the charm of history is doubled by touches
of strange imagination and confessions of human frailty.

Pepys' connection with literature is that rather of a virtuoso than of a
student in the strict sense of the term. He projected a great History of
the Navy, which might have immortalised him in a very different fashion
from that of the immortality which the Diary has achieved. But his life
was crowded with business and its intervals with pleasures. The weakness
of his eyes also militated against any serious contribution to
literature, and instead of the History, for which he had gathered much
material and many manuscripts, he gave us only the little volume
entitled _Memoirs of the Navy_, which, however, shows a remarkable grasp
of his subject, and of all corresponding affairs, such as could only
have been possessed by a man of unusually thorough knowledge of his
business. He collected what was for his time a splendid library,
consisting of some three thousand volumes, now preserved in his College
(Magdalene College, Cambridge), very carefully arranged and catalogued.
We read much of this library while it is accumulating--much more about
the mahogany cases in which the books were to stand than about the books
themselves, or his own reading of them. The details of their arrangement
were very dear to his curious m