for interment in their original tombs. We think vaguely that a man who
died a few years ago would in some way be outraged if his body were to
be publicly displayed, while we do not for an instant regard the
possible feelings of delicate and highly-born Egyptian ladies, on whose
seemly sepulture such anxious and tender care was expended so many
centuries ago.

But in this case there is no such responsibility. None of the persons
concerned have any objection to the publication of these records, and
as for the writer himself he was entirely free from any desire for a
fastidious seclusion. His life was a secluded one enough, and he felt
strongly that a man has a right to his own personal privacy. But his
own words sufficiently prove, if proof were needed, that he felt that
to deny the right of others to participate in thoughts and experiences,
which might uplift or help a mourner or a sufferer, was a selfish form
of individualism with which he had no sympathy whatever. He felt, and I
have heard him say, that one has no right to withhold from others any
reflections which can console and sustain, and he held it to be the
supreme duty of a man to ease, if he could, the burden of another. He
knew that there is no sympathy in the world so effective as the sharing
of similar experiences, as the power of assuring a sufferer that
another has indeed trodden the same dark path and emerged into the
light of Heaven. I will even venture to say that he deliberately
intended that his records should be so used, for purposes of
alleviation and consolation, and the bequest that he made of his papers
to myself, entrusting them to my absolute discretion, makes it clear to
me that I have divined his wishes in the matter. I think, indeed, that
his only doubt was a natural diffidence as to whether the record had
sufficient importance to justify its publication. In any case, my own
duty in the matter is to me absolutely clear.

But I think that it will be as well for me to sketch a brief outline of
my friend's life and character. I would have preferred to have done
this, if it had been possible, by allowing him to speak for himself.
But the earlier Diaries which exist are nothing but the briefest
chronicle of events. He put his earlier confessions into his books, but
he was in many ways more interesting than his books, and so I will try
and draw a portrait of him as he appeared to one of his earliest
friends. I knew him first as an undergraduate