as Sir William Coventry. And from two other facts
I think we may infer that he had entertained, even if he had not
acquiesced in, the thought of a far-distant publicity. The first is of
capital importance: the Diary was not destroyed. The second--that he
took unusual precautions to confound the cipher in "rogueish"
passages--proves, beyond question, that he was thinking of some other
reader besides himself. Perhaps while his friends were admiring the
"greatness of his behaviour" at the approach of death, he may have had a
twinkling hope of immortality. _Mens cujusque is est quisque_, said his
chosen motto; and, as he had stamped his mind with every crook and
foible in the pages of the Diary, he might feel that what he left behind
him was indeed himself. There is perhaps no other instance so remarkable
of the desire of man for publicity and an enduring name. The greatness
of his life was open, yet he longed to communicate its smallness also;
and, while contemporaries bowed before him, he must buttonhole posterity
with the news that his periwig was once alive with nits. But this
thought, although I cannot doubt he had it, was neither his first nor
his deepest; it did not colour one word that he wrote; and the Diary,
for as long as he kept it, remained what it was when he began, a private
pleasure for himself. It was his bosom secret; it added a zest to all
his pleasures; he lived in and for it, and might well write these solemn
words, when he closed that confidant for ever: "And so I betake myself
to that course which is almost as much as to see myself go into the
grave; for which, and all the discomforts that will accompany my being
blind, the good God prepare me."

A LIBERAL GENIUS

Pepys spent part of a certain winter Sunday, when he had taken physic,
composing "a song in praise of a liberal genius (such as I take my own
to be) to all studies and pleasures." The song was unsuccessful, but the
Diary is, in a sense, the very song that he was seeking; and his
portrait by Hales, so admirably reproduced in Mynors Bright's edition,
is a confirmation of the Diary. Hales, it would appear, had known his
business; and though he put his sitter to a deal of trouble, almost
breaking his neck "to have the portrait full of shadows," and draping
him in an Indian gown hired expressly for the purpose, he was
preoccupied about no merely picturesque effects, but to portray the
essence of the man. Whether we read the picture by the Di