Mr. Pepys was
an appreciator of life to a degree that not many Englishmen have been
since Chaucer. He was a walking appetite. And not an entirely ignoble
appetite either. He reminds one in some respects of the poet in Browning's
"How it strikes a Contemporary," save that he had more worldly success.
One fancies him with the same inquisitive ferrule on the end of his stick,
the same "scrutinizing hat," the same eye for the bookstall and "the man
who slices lemon into drink." "If any cursed a woman, he took note."
Browning's poet, however, apparently "took note" on behalf of a higher
power. It is difficult to imagine Mr. Pepys sending his Diary to the
address of the Recording Angel. Rather, the Diary is the soliloquy of an
egoist, disinterested and daring as a bad boy's reverie over the fire.

Nearly all those who have written about Pepys are perplexed by the
question whether Pepys wrote his Diary with a view to its ultimate
publication. This seems to me to betray some ignorance of the working of
the human mind.

Those who find one of the world's puzzles in the fact that Mr. Pepys
wrapped his great book in the secrecy of a cipher, as though he meant no
other eye ever to read it but his own, perplex their brains unnecessarily.
Pepys was not the first human being to make his confession in an empty
confessional. Criminals, lovers and other egoists, for lack of a priest,
will make their confessions to a stone wall or a tree. There is no more
mystery in it than in the singing of birds. The motive may be either to
obtain discharge from the sense of guilt or a desire to save and store up
the very echoes and last drops of pleasure. Human beings keep diaries for
as many different reasons as they write lyric poems. With Pepys, I fancy,
the main motive was a simple happiness in chewing the cud of pleasure.
The fact that so much of his pleasure had to be kept secret from the world
made it all the more necessary for him to babble when alone. True, in the
early days his confidences are innocent enough. Pepys began to write in
cipher some time before there was any purpose in it save the common
prudence of a secretive man. Having built, however, this secret and
solitary fastness, he gradually became more daring. He had discovered a
room to the walls of which he dared speak aloud. Here we see the
respectable man liberated. He no longer needs to be on his official
behaviour, but may play the part of a small Nero, if he wishes, behind the