not
able to number the days of a man'--which, God knows, is not the fault of
arithmetique, but that our understandings reach not the thing." "The
blockhead Albemarle hath strange luck to be loved, though he be, and
every man must know it, the heaviest man in the world, but stout and
honest to his country." "He advises me in what I write to him, to be as
short as I can, and obscure." "But he do tell me that the House is in
such a condition that nobody can tell what to make of them, and, he
thinks, they were never in before; that everybody leads and nobody
follows." "My Lord Middleton did come to-day, and seems to me but a
dull, heavy man; but he is a great soldier, and stout, and a needy
Lord." A man who goes about the world making remarks of that kind, would
need a cipher in which to write them down. His world is everything to
him, and he certainly makes the most of it so far as observation and
remark are concerned.

If Pepys' curiosity and infinitely varied shrewdness and observation may
be justly regarded as phenomenal, the complexity of his moral character
is no less amazing. He is full of industry and ambition, reading for his
favourite book Bacon's _Faber Fortunae_, "which I can never read too
often." He is "joyful beyond myself that I cannot express it, to see,
that as I do take pains, so God blesses me, and has sent me masters that
do observe that I take pains." Again he is "busy till night blessing
myself mightily to see what a deal of business goes off a man's hands
when he stays at it." Colonel Birch tells him "that he knows him to be a
man of the old way of taking pains."

This is interesting in itself, and it is a very marked trait in his
character, but it gains a wonderful pathos when we remember that this
infinite taking of pains was done in a losing battle with blindness.
There is a constantly increasing succession of references in the Diary
to his failing eyesight and his fears of blindness in the future. The
references are made in a matter-of-fact tone, and are as free from
self-pity as if he were merely recording the weather or the date. All
the more on that account, the days when he is weary and almost blind
with writing and reading, and the long nights when he is unable to read,
show him to be a very brave and patient man. He consults Boyle as to
spectacles, but fears that he will have to leave off his Diary, since
the cipher begins to hurt his eyes. The lights of the theatre become
intolerable, an