_Pulvis et
umbra_--that is the moral of "Pepys's Diary." Life yet lives so strong
in the cyphered pages; all the colour, all the mirth, all the little
troubles and sins, and vows, they are so real they might be of yesterday
or to-day, but the end of them came nigh two hundred years ago.
Therefore, to read Pepys is to enjoy our own brief innings better, as men
who know that our March is passing where Pepys' May has flown before, and
that we shall soon be with him and his wife, and the Scot, and the red-
faced parson. So fleeting is life, whose record outlives it for ever; so
brief, so swift, so faint the joys and sorrows, and all that we make
marvel of in our own fortunes and those of other men.

Reading Pepys is thus like reading Montaigne, whose cheery scepticism his
revelations recall. But Pepys has all the advantage of the man living in
the busiest world over the recluse in that famed library, with the
mottoes on the wall. Montaigne wrote in a retired and contemplative
home, viewing life, as Osman Digna has viewed strife, "from afar," almost
safe from the shots of fortune. But Pepys writes day by day, like a war
correspondent, in the thick of the battle; his head "full of business,"
as he declares; his heart full of many desires, many covetings, much
pride in matters that look small enough. He notes how, by chewing
tobacco, Mr. Chetwynde, who was consumptive, became very fat. He remarks
how a board fell, and the dust powdered the ladies' heads at the play,
"which made good sport." He records every venison-pasty, every flagon of
wine, every pretty wench whom he encountered in his march through his
youth towards the vault in St. Olave's. He is vexed with Mrs. Pepys and
troubled by "my aunt's base ugly humours." He is "full of repentance,"
like the Bad Man in the Ethics, and thinks how much he is addicted to
expense and pleasure, "so that now I can hardly reclaim myself." He
interests himself in Dr. Williams's remarkable dog, which not only killed
cats, but buried them with punctilious obsequies, never leaving the tip
of puss's tail out of the ground. Then he goes to the play, "after
swearing to my wife that I would never go to the play without her." He
remembers one night that he passed "with the greatest epicurism of
sleep," because he was often disturbed, and so got out of sleeping more
conscious enjoyment. Now he sleeps what Socrates calls the sweetest
slumber of all, if it be but dreamless, or, somewhe