t were only for his own
eyes he would enjoy passages which the more fastidious public might
judge differently.

So it comes to pass that this amazing _omnium gatherum_ of a book is
among the most living of all the gifts of the past to the present,
telling everything and telling it irresistibly. His hat falls through a
hole, and he writes down all about the incident as faithfully as he
describes the palace of the King of France, and the English war with
Holland. His nature is amazingly complicated, and yet our judgment of it
is simplified by his passion for telling everything, no matter how
discreditable or how ignoble the detail may be. He is a great man and a
great statesman, and he is the liveliest of our English crickets on the
hearth. One set of excerpts would present him as the basest, another set
as the pleasantest and kindliest of men; and always without any
exception he is refreshing by his intense and genial interest in the
facts of the world. Of the many summaries of himself which he has given
us, none is more characteristic than the following, with which he closes
the month of April of the year 1666: "Thus ends this month; my wife in
the country, myself full of pleasure and expence; in some trouble for my
friends, and my Lord Sandwich, by the Parliament, and more for my eyes,
which are daily worse and worse, that I dare not write or read almost
anything." He is essentially a virtuoso who has been forced by
circumstances into the necessity of being also a public man, and has
developed on his own account an extraordinary passion for the
observation of small and wayside things. At the high table of those
times, where Milton and Bunyan sit at the mighty feast of English
literature, he is present also: but he is under the table, a mischievous
and yet observant child, loosening the neckerchiefs of those who are too
drunk, and picking up scraps of conversation which he will retail
outside. There is something peculiarly pathetic in the whole picture.
One remembers Defoe, who for so many years lived in the reputation of
honourable politics and in the odour of such sanctity as Robinson Crusoe
could give, until the discovery of certain yellow papers revealed the
base political treachery for which the great island story had been a
kind of anodyne to conscience. So Samuel Pepys would have passed for a
great naval authority and an anxious friend of England when her foes
were those of her own household, had he only been abl