nimal, swiftly shares and changes with
his company and surroundings; and these changes are the better part of
his education in the world. To strike a posture once for all, and to
march through life like a drum-major, is to be highly disagreeable to
others and a fool for oneself into the bargain. To Evelyn and to Knipp
we understand the double facing; but to whom was he posing in the Diary,
and what, in the name of astonishment, was the nature of the pose? Had
he suppressed all mention of the book, or had he bought it, gloried in
the act, and cheerfully recorded his glorification, in either case we
should have made him out. But no; he is full of precautions to conceal
the "disgrace" of the purchase, and yet speeds to chronicle the whole
affair in pen and ink. It is a sort of anomaly in human action, which we
can exactly parallel from another part of the Diary.

Mrs. Pepys had written a paper of her too just complaints against her
husband, and written it in plain and very pungent English. Pepys, in an
agony lest the world should come to see it, brutally seizes and destroys
the tell-tale document; and then--you disbelieve your eyes--down goes the
whole story with unsparing truth and in the cruellest detail. It seems
he has no design but to appear respectable, and here he keeps a private
book to prove he was not. You are at first faintly reminded of some of
the vagaries of the morbid religious diarist; but at a moment's thought
the resemblance disappears. The design of Pepys is not at all to edify;
it is not from repentance that he chronicles his peccadilloes, for he
tells us when he does repent, and, to be just to him, there often follows
some improvement. Again, the sins of the religious diarist are of a very
formal pattern, and are told with an elaborate whine. But in Pepys you
come upon good, substantive misdemeanors; beams in his eye of which he
alone remains unconscious; healthy outbreaks of the animal nature, and
laughable subterfuges to himself that always command belief and often
engage the sympathies.

Pepys was a young man for his age, came slowly to himself in the world,
sowed his wild oats late, took late to industry, and preserved till
nearly forty the headlong gusto of a boy. So, to come rightly at the
spirit in which the Diary was written, we must recall a class of
sentiments which with most of us are over and done before the age of
twelve. In our tender years we still preserve a freshness of su