Pepys' connection with literature is that rather of a virtuoso than of a student in the strict sense of the term. He projected a great History of the Navy, which might have immortalised him in a very different fashion from that of the immortality which the Diary has achieved. But his life was crowded with business and its intervals with pleasures. The weakness of his eyes also militated against any serious contribution to literature, and instead of the History, for which he had gathered much material and many manuscripts, he gave us only the little volume entitled _Memoirs of the Navy_, which, however, shows a remarkable grasp of his subject, and of all corresponding affairs, such as could only have been possessed by a man of unusually thorough knowledge of his business. He collected what was for his time a splendid library, consisting of some three thousand volumes, now preserved in his College (Magdalene College, Cambridge), very carefully arranged and catalogued. We read much of this library while it is accumulating--much more about the mahogany cases in which the books were to stand than about the books themselves, or his own reading of them. The details of their arrangement were very dear to his curious mind. He tells us that where the books would not fit exactly to the shelves, but were smaller than the space, he had little gilded stilts made, adjusted to the size of each book, and placed under the volumes, which they lifted to the proper height. Little time can have been left over for the study of at least the stiffer works in that library, although there are many notes which show that he was in some sense a reader, and that books served the same purpose as events and personalities in leading him up and down the byways of what he always found to be a curious and interesting world. But the immortal part of Pepys is undoubtedly his Diary. Among others of the innumerable curious interests which this man cultivated was that of studying the secret ciphers which had been invented and used by literary people in the past. From his knowledge of these he was enabled to invent a cipher of his own, or rather to adopt one which he altered somewhat to serve his uses. Having found this sufficiently secret code, he was now able to gratify his immense interest in himself and his inordinate personal vanity by writing an intimate narrative of his own life. The Diary covers nine and a half years in all, from January 1660 to May 1669. For nearly a century and a half it lay dead and silent, until Rev. J. Smith, with infinite diligence and pains, discovered the key to it, and wrote his translation. A later translation has been made by Rev. Mynors Bright, which includes some passages by the judgment of the former translator considered unnecessary or inadvisable.