. There, as they walk upon the Downs, they
come "where a flock of sheep was; and the most pleasant and innocent
sight that ever I saw in my life. We found a shepherd and his little boy
reading, far from any houses or sight of people, the Bible to him; so I
made the boy read to me, which he did.... He did content himself
mightily in my liking his boy's reading, and did bless God for him, the
most like one of the old patriarchs that ever I saw in my life, and it
brought those thoughts of the old age of the world in my mind for two or
three days after."

Such is some slight conception, gathered from a few of many thousands of
quaint and sparkling revelations of this strange character. Over against
the "ingenious dreamer," Bunyan, here is a man who never dreams. He is
the realist, pure and unsophisticated; and the stray touches of pathos,
on which here and there one chances in his Diary, are written without
the slightest attempt at sentiment, or any other thought than that they
are plain matters of fact. He might have stood for this prototype of
many of Bunyan's characters. Now he is Mr. Worldly Wiseman, now Mr.
By-ends, and Mr. Hold-the-World; and taken altogether, with all his
good and bad qualities, he is a fairly typical citizen of Vanity Fair.

There are indeed in his character exits towards idealism and
possibilities of it, but their promise is never fulfilled. There is, for
instance, his kindly good-nature. That quality was the one and
all-atoning virtue of the times of Charles the Second, and it was
supposed to cover a multitude of sins. Yet Charles the Second's was a
reign of constant persecution, and of unspeakable selfishness in high
places. Pepys persecutes nobody, and yet some touch of unblushing
selfishness mars every kindly thing he does. If he sends a haunch of
venison to his mother, he lets you know that it was far too bad for his
own table. He loves his father with what is obviously a quite genuine
affection, but in his references to him there is generally a significant
remembrance of himself. He tells us that his father is a man "who,
besides that he is my father, and a man that loves me, and hath ever
done so, is also, at this day, one of the most careful and innocent men
of the world." He advises his father "to good husbandry and to be living
within the bounds of L50 a year, and all in such kind words, as not only
made both them but myself to weep." He hopes that his father may recover
from his illness