h that other one to Mrs. Knipp
which he signed by the pseudonym of _Dapper Dicky_; yet each would be
suitable to the character of his correspondent. There is no untruth in
this, for man, being a Protean animal, 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 misdemeanours; 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
spir