herous of men.

In some respects Mr. Pepys reminds one of a type that is now commoner in
Scotland, I fancy, than elsewhere. He himself seems at one time to have
taken the view that he was of Scottish descent. None of the authorities,
however, will admit this, and there is apparently no doubt that he
belonged to an old Cambridgeshire family that had come down in the world,
his father having dwindled into a London tailor. In temperament, however,
he seems to me to have been more Scottish than the very Scottish Boswell.
He led a double life with the same simplicity of heart. He was Scottish in
the way in which he lived with one eye on the "lassies" and the other on
"the meenister." He was notoriously respectable, notoriously hard-working,
a judge of sermons, fond of the bottle, cautious, thrifty. He had all the
virtues of a K.C.B. He was no scapegrace or scallywag such as you might
find nowadays crowing over his sins in Chelsea. He lived, so far as the
world was concerned, in the complete starch of rectitude. He was a pillar
of Society, and whatever age he had been born in, he would have accepted
its orthodoxy. He was as grave a man as Holy Willie. Stevenson has
commented on the gradual decline of his primness in the later years of the
Diary. "His favourite ejaculation, 'Lord!' occurs," he declares, "but once
that I have observed in 1660, never in '61, twice in '62, and at least
five times in '63; after which the 'Lords' may be said to pullulate like
herrings, with here and there a solitary 'damned,' as it were a whale
among the shoal." As a matter of fact, Mr. Pepys's use of the expression
"Lord!" has been greatly exaggerated, especially by the parodists. His
primness, if that is the right word, never altogether deserted him. We
discover this even in the story of his relations with women. In 1665, for
instance, he writes with surprised censoriousness of Mrs. Penington:

There we drank and laughed [he relates], and she willingly suffered
me to put my hand in her bosom very wantonly, and keep it there
long. Which methought was very strange, and I looked upon myself as
a man mightily deceived in a lady, for I could not have thought she
could have suffered it by her former discourse with me; so modest
she seemed and I know not what.

It is a sad world for idealists.

Mr. Pepys's Puritanism, however, was something less than Mr. Pepys. It was
but a pair of creaking Sunday boots on the feet of a pagan.