The great charm of Mr. Pepys and all such diary writing is, that it gives us, by a hundred little gossipy touches, the actual complexion of the times. We have no conventional speech to wrestle with, in order to get at its meaning. The plain white lights of honesty and common-sense--so much better than all the rhetorical prismatic hues--put the actual situation before us; and we have an approach to that realism which the highest art is always struggling to reach. The courtiers in their great, fresh-curled wigs, strut and ogle and prattle before us. We scent the perfumed locks of Peter Lely’s ladies, and the eels frying in the kitchen. We see Mr. Samuel Pepys bowing to the Princess Henrietta, and know we shall hear of it if he makes a misstep in backing out of her august presence. How he gloats over that new plush, or moire-antique, that has just come home for his wife--cost four guineas--which price shocks him a little, and sends him to bed vexed, and makes him think he had better have kept by the old woollen stuff; but, next Lord’s day being bright, and she wearing it to St. Margaret’s or St. Giles’, where he watches her as she sits under the dull fire of the sermon--her face beaming with gratitude, and radiant with red ribbons--he relents, and softens, and is proud and glad, and goes to sleep! This Pepys stands a good chance to outlive Butler, and to outlive Burnet, and to outlive Clarendon, and to outlive John Evelyn. I may add further to this mention of the old diarist, that at a certain period of his life he became suspected--and without reason--of complicity with the Popish plots (of whose intricacies you will get curious and graphic illustration in _Peveril of the Peak_); and poor Pepys had his period of prisonship like so many others in that day. He also became, at a later time, singularly enough, the President of the Royal Society of England--a Society formed in the course of Charles II.s’ reign, and which enrolled such men as Robert Boyle and Sir Isaac Newton in its early days; and which now enrols the best and worthiest of England’s scientists. I do not think they would elect such a man as Samuel Pepys for President now; yet it would appear that the old gentleman in his long wig and his new coat made a good figure in the chair, and looked wise, and used to have the members down informally at his rooms in York Building, where he made good cheer for them, and broached his best bin of claret. Nor should it be forgotten that Pepys had an appreciative ear for the melodies of Chaucer (like very few in his day), and spurred Dryden to the making of some of his best imitations. When he died--it was in the early years of the eighteenth century--he left his books, manuscripts, and engravings, which were valuable, to Magdalen College, Cambridge; and there, as I said when we first came upon his name, his famous _Diary_, in short-hand, lay unheard of and unriddled for more than a hundred years. _A Scientist._