ind. He tells us that where the books
would not fit exactly to the shelves, but were smaller than the space,
he had little gilded stilts made, adjusted to the size of each book, and
placed under the volumes, which they lifted to the proper height. Little
time can have been left over for the study of at least the stiffer works
in that library, although there are many notes which show that he was in
some sense a reader, and that books served the same purpose as events
and personalities in leading him up and down the byways of what he
always found to be a curious and interesting world.

But the immortal part of Pepys is undoubtedly his Diary. Among others of
the innumerable curious interests which this man cultivated was that of
studying the secret ciphers which had been invented and used by literary
people in the past. From his knowledge of these he was enabled to invent
a cipher of his own, or rather to adopt one which he altered somewhat to
serve his uses. Having found this sufficiently secret code, he was now
able to gratify his immense interest in himself and his inordinate
personal vanity by writing an intimate narrative of his own life. The
Diary covers nine and a half years in all, from January 1660 to May
1669. For nearly a century and a half it lay dead and silent, until Rev.
J. Smith, with infinite diligence and pains, discovered the key to it,
and wrote his translation. A later translation has been made by Rev.
Mynors Bright, which includes some passages by the judgment of the
former translator considered unnecessary or inadvisable.

Opinions differ as to the wisdom, and indeed the morality, of forcing
upon the public ear the accidentally discovered secrets which a dead man
had guarded so carefully. There is, of course, the possibility that, as
some think, Pepys desired that posterity should have the complete record
in all its frankness and candour. If this be so, one can only say that
the wish is evidence of a morbid and unbalanced mind. It seems much more
probable that he wrote the Diary for the luxury of reading it to
himself, always intending to destroy it before his death. But a piece of
work so intimate as this is, in a sense, a living part of the man who
creates it, and one can well imagine him putting off the day of its
destruction, and grudging that it should perish with all its power of
awakening old chords of memory and revitalising buried years. For his
own part he was no squeamish moralist and if i