safety of shorthand. And how he takes advantage of his opportunities! He
remains to the end something of a Puritan in his standards and his public
carriage, but in his diary he reveals himself as a pig from the sty of
Epicurus, naked and only half-ashamed. He never, it must be admitted,
entirely shakes off his timidity. At a crisis he dare not confess in
English even in a cipher, but puts the worst in bad French with a blush.
In some instances the French may be for facetiousness rather than
concealment, as in the reference to the ladies of Rochester Castle in
1665:

Thence to Rochester, walked to the Crowne, and while dinner was
getting ready, I did then walk to visit the old Castle ruines,
which hath been a noble place, and there going up I did upon the
stairs overtake three pretty mayds or women and took them up with
me, and I did _baiser sur mouches et toucher leur mains_ and necks
to my great pleasure; but lord! to see what a dreadfull thing it is
to look down the precipices, for it did fright me mightily, and
hinder me of much pleasure which I would have made to myself in the
company of these three, if it had not been for that.

Even here, however, Mr. Pepys's French has a suggestion of evasion. He
always had a faint hope that his conscience would not understand French.

Some people have written as though Mr. Pepys, in confessing himself in his
Diary, had confessed us all. They profess to see in the Diary simply the
image of Everyman in his bare skin. They think of Pepys as an ordinary man
who wrote an extraordinary book. To me it seems that Pepys's Diary is not
more extraordinary as a book than Pepys himself is as a man. Taken
separately, nine out of ten of his characteristics may seem ordinary
enough--his fears, his greeds, his vices, his utilitarian repentances.
They were compounded in him, however, in such proportion as to produce an
entirely new mixture--a character hardly less original than Dr. Johnson or
Charles Lamb. He had not any great originality of virtue, as these others
had, but he was immensely original in his responsiveness--his capacity for
being interested, tempted and pleased. The voluptuous nature of the man
may be seen in such a passage as that in which, speaking of "the
wind-musique when the angel comes down" in _The Virgin Martyr_, he
declares:

It ravished me, and indeed, in a word, did wrap up my soul so that
it made me really sick, just as I h