than a clinking of glasses (or perhaps Nell Gwynne's name pops in
sight)--bless us how the eye will hurry to turn the leaf on the chance
of roguery to come! Who would read through a long discourse on Admiralty
business, if it be known before that Pepys is engaged with the pretty Mrs.
Knipp for a trip to Bartholomew Fair to view the dancing horse, and that
the start is to be made on the turning of the page? Or a piece of scandal
about Lady Castlemaine, how her nose fell out of joint when Mrs. Stuart
came to court--such things tease one from the sterner business.

And for these reasons, we have been inclined to underestimate the
importance of Pepys' diary. Francis Jeffrey, who wrote long ago about
Pepys, evidently thought that he was an idle and unprofitable fellow and
that the diary was too much given to mean and petty things. But in reality
the diary is an historical mine. Even when Pepys plays upon the surface,
he throws out facts that can be had nowhere else. No one would venture to
write of Restoration life without digging through his pages. Pepys wrote in
a confused shorthand, maybe against the eye of his wife, from whom he had
reason to conceal his offenses. The papers lay undeciphered until 1825,
when a partial publication was made. There were additions by subsequent
editors until now it appears that the Wheatley text of 1893-1899 is final.
But ever since 1825, the diary has been judged to be of high importance in
the understanding of the first decade of the Restoration.

If some of the weightier parts are somewhat dry, there are places in which
a lighter show of personality is coincident with real historical data.
Foremost are the pages where Pepys goes to the theatre.

More than Charles II was restored in 1660. Among many things of more
importance than this worthless King, the theatre was restored. Since the
close of Elizabethan times it had been out of business. More than thirty
years before, Puritanism had snuffed out its candles and driven its
fiddlers to the streets. But Puritanism, in its turn, fell with the return
of the Stuarts. Pepys is a chief witness as to what kind of theatre it was
that was set up in London about the year 1660. It was far different from
the Elizabethan theatre. It came in from the Bankside and the fields to the
north of the city and lodged itself on the better streets and squares. It
no longer patterned itself on the inn-yard, but was roofed against the
rain. The time had been when