There were, as everybody knows, two famous diarists of the Restoration period, Pepys and Evelyn. It is interesting to look at the portraits of the two men side by side. Evelyn's face is anxious and austere, suggesting the sort of stuff of which soldiers or saints are made. Pepys is a voluptuous figure, in the style of Charles the Second, with regular and handsome features below his splendid wig, and eyes that are both keen and heavy, penetrating and luxurious. These two men (who, in the course of their work, had to compare notes on several occasions, and between whom we have the record of more than one meeting) were among the most famous gossips of the world. But Evelyn's gossip is a succession of solemnities compared with the racy scandal, the infantile and insatiable curiosity, and the incredible frankness of the pagan diarist. Look at his face again, and you will find it impossible not to feel a certain amount of surprise. Of all the unlikely faces with which history has astonished the readers of books, there are none more surprising than those of three contemporaries in the later seventeenth century. Claverhouse, with his powerful character and indomitable will, with his Titanic daring and relentless cruelty, has the face of a singularly beautiful young girl. Judge Jeffreys, whose delight in blood was only equalled by the foulness and extravagance of his profanity, looks in his picture the very type of spiritual wistfulness. Samuel Pepys, whose large oval eyes and clear-cut profile suggest a somewhat voluptuous and very fastidious aristocrat, was really a man of the people, sharp to a miracle in all the detail of the humblest kind of life, and apparently unable to keep from exposing himself to scandal in many sorts of mean and vulgar predicament. Since the deciphering and publication of his Diary, a great deal has been written concerning it. The best accounts of it are Henry B. Wheatley's _Samuel Pepys and the World he Lived in_, and Robert Louis Stevenson's little essay in his _Short Studies of Men and Books_. The object of the present lecture is not to give any general account of the time and its public events, upon which the Diary touches at a thousand points, but rather to set the spirit of this man in contrast with that of John Bunyan, which we have just considered. The men are very typical, and any adequate conception of the spirit of either will give a true cross-section of the age in which he lived. Pepys, it must be confessed, is much more at home in his times than Bunyan ever could be. One might even say that the times seem to have been designed as a background for the diarist. There is as little of the spirit of a stranger and pilgrim in Pepys, even in his most pathetic hours, as there is in John Bunyan the spirit of a man at home, even in his securest. It was a very pagan time, and Pepys is the pagan _par excellence_ of that time, the bright and shining example of the pagan spirit of England.