At the suggestion of his friend Mr. Upcott, Colburn undertook, in 1818, the publication of “Evelyn’s Diary,” and its success would have been almost unparalleled had it not been followed in 1825 by the “Diary of Pepys.” For more than 150 years this work reposed unread and unknown, until Mr. John Smith succeeded in deciphering the stenographic characters which had concealed so much amusement from the world. The work, edited by Lord Braybrooke, was published in two volumes at six guineas, and though this and the two succeeding editions, at five guineas, were almost worthless from the editorial excisions they had undergone from the too-modest fingers of the noble editor, the issues went off very rapidly, and Colburn obtained a very handsome profit on the £2200 he had paid for the copyright. In the fourth edition of 1848 Lord Braybrooke was urged to restore those characteristic passages which he had before condemned, and the full value of the work, as a photographic picture of an amusing, though dissolute, time was firmly established. Evelyn had before given us the history of Charles the Second’s Court, with a gravity and openly-expressed reprobation which finely suited his character of a worthy and dignified old English country gentleman; but still it is now to the pages of Pepys that all the world turns for an account of the royal domestic life of certainly the most infamous period of our annals. He is so charmingly garrulous, jotting down each night such quaint thoughts on what he had seen during the day, writing them by his fireside, with the same nonchalance with which he put on his night-cap, and with as little suspicion of ever being surprised in the one act as the other, that his truthfulness, his openness, and his scarcely-concealed partiality for as much vagabonding and frolicsome society as Mrs. Pepys would permit, carry the reader irresistibly along with him.