with Mrs. Ainsworth of Cambridge. But youth is a hot season
with all; when a man smells April and May he is apt at times to stumble;
and in spite of a disordered practice, Pepys's theory, the better things
that he approved and followed after, we may even say were strict. Where
there was "tag, rag, and bobtail, dancing, singing, and drinking," he
felt "ashamed, and went away"; and when he slept in church he prayed God
forgive him. In but a little while we find him with some ladies keeping
each other awake "from spite," as though not to sleep in church were an
obvious hardship; and yet later he calmly passes the time of service,
looking about him, with a perspective-glass, on all the pretty women.
His favourite ejaculation, "Lord!" occurs but once that I have observed
in 1660, never in '61, twice in '62, and at least five times in '63;
after which the "Lords" may be said to pullulate like herrings, with
here and there a solitary "damned," as it were a whale among the shoal.
He and his wife, once filled with dudgeon by some innocent freedoms at a
marriage, are soon content to go pleasuring with my Lord Brouncker's
mistress, who was not even, by his own account, the most discreet of
mistresses. Tag, rag, and bobtail, dancing, singing, and drinking,
become his natural element; actors and actresses and drunken, roaring
courtiers are to be found in his society; until the man grew so involved
with Saturnalian manners and companions that he was shot almost
unconsciously into the grand domestic crash of 1668.

That was the legitimate issue and punishment of years of staggering walk
and conversation. The man who has smoked his pipe for half a century in
a powder-magazine finds himself at last the author and the victim of a
hideous disaster. So with our pleasant-minded Pepys and his
peccadilloes. All of a sudden, as he still trips dexterously enough
among the dangers of a double-faced career, thinking no great evil,
humming to himself the trillo, Fate takes the further conduct of that
matter from his hands, and brings him face to face with the consequences
of his acts. For a man still, after so many years, the lover, although
not the constant lover, of his wife,--for a man, besides, who was so
greatly careful of appearances,--the revelation of his infidelities was
a crushing blow. The tears that he shed, the indignities that he
endured, are not to be measured. A vulgar woman, and now justly
incensed, Mrs. Pepys spared him no detail