it 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 surprise at
our prolonged existence; events make an impression out of all proportion
to their consequence; we are unspeakably touched by our own past
adventures, and look forward to our future personality with sentimental
interest. It was something of this, I think, that clung to Pepys.
Although not sentimental in the abstract, he was sweetly sentimental
about himself. His own past clung about his heart, an evergreen. He was
the slave of an association. He could not pass by Islington, where his
father used to carry him to cakes and ale, but he must light at the
"King's Head" and eat and drink "for remembrance of the old house
sake." He counted it good fortune to lie a night at Epsom to renew his
old walks, "where Mrs. Hely and I did use to walk and talk, with whom I
had the first sentiments of love and pleasure in a woman's company,
discourse and taking her by the hand, she being a pretty woman." He goes
about weighing up the _Assurance_, which lay near Woolwich under water,
and cries in a parenthesis, "Poor ship, that I have been twice merry in,
in Captain Holland's time"; and after revisiting the _Naseby_, now
changed into the _Charles_, he confesses "it was a great pleasure to
myself to see the ship that I began my good fortune in." The stone that
he was cut for he preserved in a case; and to the Turners he kept alive
such gratitude for their assistance, that for years, and after he had
begun to mount himself into higher zones, he continued to have that
family to dinner on the anniversary of the operation. Not Hazlitt nor
Rousseau had a more romantic passion for their past, although at times
they might express it more romantically; and if Pepys shared with them
this childish fondness, did not Rousseau, who left behind him the
"Confessions," or Hazlitt, who wrote the "Liber Amoris," and loaded his
essays with loving personal detail, share with Pepys in his unwearied
egotism? For the two things go hand in hand; or, to be more exact, it is
the first that makes the second either possible or pleasing.

But, to be quite in sympathy with Pepys, we must return once more to the
experience of children. I can remember to have written, in the fly-leaf
of more than one book, the date and the place where I then was--if, for
instance, I was ill