It is a _Diary_ which, beginning in 1660, the first of Charles’ reign, covers the ten important succeeding years; within which he saw regicides hung and quartered, and heard the guns of terrific naval battles with the Dutch, and braved all the horrors of the Great Plague from the day when he first saw house-doors with a red cross marked on them, and the words “Lord, have mercy on us!” to the time when ten thousand died in a week, and “little noise was heard, day or night, but tolling of bells.” Page after page of his _Diary_ is also given to the great fire of the following year--from the Sunday night when he was waked by his maid to see a big light on the back side of Mark Lane, to the following Thursday when two-thirds of the houses and of the churches of London were in ashes. But Pepys’ _Diary_ is not so valued for its story of great events as for its daily setting down of little unimportant things--of the plays which he saw acted--of the dust that fell on the theatre-goers from the galleries--of what he bought, and what he conjectured, and what his wife said to him, and what new dresses she had, and how he slept comfortably through the sermon of Dr. So-and-So--just as you and I might have done--never having a thought either that his _Diary_ would ever be printed. He wrote it, in fact, in a blind short-hand, which made it lie unnoticed and undetected for a great many years, until at last some prying Cambridge man unriddled his cipher and wrote out and published _Pepys’ Diary_ to the world. And it is delightful; it is so true and honest, and straightforward, and gossipy; and it throws more light upon the every-day life in London in those days of the Restoration than all the other books ever written.