ends to the most fastidious particulars,
and yet sweeps all away in the forthright current of the
narrative,--such a style may be ungrammatical, it may be inelegant, it
may be one tissue of mistakes, but it can never be devoid of merit. The
first and the true function of the writer has been thoroughly performed
throughout; and though the manner of his utterance may be childishly
awkward, the matter has been transformed and assimilated by his
unfeigned interest and delight. The gusto of the man speaks out fierily
after all these years. For the difference between Pepys and Shelley, to
return to that half-whimsical approximation, is one of quality but not
one of degree; in his sphere, Pepys felt as keenly, and his is the true
prose of poetry--prose because the spirit of the man was narrow and
earthly, but poetry because he was delightedly alive. Hence, in such a
passage as this about the Epsom shepherd, the result upon the reader's
mind is entire conviction and unmingled pleasure. So, you feel, the
thing fell out, not otherwise; and you would no more change it than you
would change a sublimity of Shakespeare's, a homely touch of Bunyan's,
or a favoured reminiscence of your own.

There never was a man nearer being an artist, who yet was not one. The
tang was in the family; while he was writing the journal for our
enjoyment in his comely house in Navy Gardens, no fewer than two of his
cousins were tramping the fens, kit under arm, to make music to the
country girls. But he himself, though he could play so many instruments,
and pass judgment in so many fields of art, remained an amateur. It is
not given to any one so keenly to enjoy, without some greater power to
understand. That he did not like Shakespeare as an artist for the stage
may be a fault, but it is not without either parallel or excuse. He
certainly admired him as a poet; he was the first beyond mere actors on
the rolls of that innumerable army who have got "To be or not to be" by
heart. Nor was he content with that; it haunted his mind; he quoted it
to himself in the pages of the Diary, and, rushing in where angels fear
to tread, he set it to music. Nothing, indeed, is more notable than the
heroic quality of the verses that our little sensualist in a periwig
chose out to marry with his own mortal strains. Some gust from brave
Elizabethan times must have warmed his spirit, as he sat tuning his
sublime theorbo. "To be or not to be. Whether 'tis nobler"--"Beauty
reti