is full of details, for he is the most curious man in the
world. One might apply to him the word catholicity if it were not far
too big and dignified an epithet. The catholicity of his mind is that of
the _Old Curiosity Shop_. The interest of the book is inexhaustible,
because to him the whole world was just such a book. His world was
indeed

So full of a number of things
He was sure we should all be as happy as kings.

Like Chaucer's Pardoner he was "meddlesome as a fly." Now he lights upon
a dane's skin hung in a church. Again, upon a magic-lantern. Yet again
upon a traitor's head, and the prospect of London in the distance. He
will drink four pints of Epsom water. He will learn to whistle like a
bird, and he will tell you a tale of a boy who was disinherited because
he crowed like a cock. He will walk across half the country to see
anything new. His heart is full of a great love of processions,
raree-shows of every kind, and, above all, novelty. His confession that
the sight of the King touching for the evil gave him no pleasure because
he had seen it before, applies to most things in his life. For such a
man, this world must indeed have been an interesting place.

We join him in well-nigh every meal he sits down to, from the first days
when they lived so plainly, on to the greater times of the end, when he
gives a dinner to his friends, which was "a better dinner than they
understood or deserved." He delights in all the detail of the table. The
cook-maid, whose wages were L4 per annum, had no easy task to satisfy
her fastidious master, and Mrs. Pepys must now and then rise at four in
the morning to make mince-pies. Any new kind of meat or drink especially
delights him. He finds ortolans to be composed of nothing but fat, and
he often seems, in his thoughts on other nations, to have for his first
point of view the sight of foreigners at dinner. But this is only part
of the insatiable and omnivorous interest in odds and ends which is
everywhere apparent. The ribbons he has seen at a wedding, the starving
seamen who are becoming a danger to the nation, the drinking of wine
with a toad in the glass, a lightning flash that melted fetters from the
limbs of slaves, Harry's chair (the latest curiosity of the
drawing-rooms, whose arms rise and clasp you into it when you sit down),
the new Messiah, who comes with a brazier of hot coals and proclaims the
doom of England--these, and a thousand other details, make up