enemies of civilization; we hold our position against them at the price of eternal vigilance, and probably the rat is not the least deadly of these enemies. I need not go through the Diary in search of incidents; most of them, while intensely amusing, are rather of interest to the psychologist in the study of self-revelation than to the medical man. When Pepys’s brother lay dying the doctor in charge hinted that possibly the trouble might have been of syphilitic origin; Pepys was virtuously wrathful, and the unhappy doctor had to apologize and was forthwith discharged. I cannot here narrate how they proved that the unhappy patient had never had syphilis in his life; you must read the Diary for that. Their method would not have satisfied either Wassermann or Bordet. Another time Pepys was doing something that he should not have been doing at an open window in a draught; the Lord punished him by striking him with Bell’s palsy. Still again, at another time he got something that seems to have resembled pseudo-ileus, possibly reflex from his latent calculi. Everybody in the street was much distressed at his anguish; all the ladies sent in prescriptions for enemata; the one which relieved him consisted of small beer! Indeed, one marvels always at the extraordinary interest shown by Pepys’s lady-friends in his most private ailments. London must have been a friendly little town in the seventeenth century, in the intervals of hanging people and chopping off heads. But the great problem remains: Why did Pepys write down all these intimate details of his private life? Why did he confess to things which most men do not confess even to themselves? Why did he write it all down in cypher? Why, when he narrated something particularly disgraceful, did he write in a mongrel dialect of bad French, Italian, Spanish, and Latin? He could not have seriously believed that a person who was able to read the Diary would not be able to read the very simple foreign words with which it is interspersed. Most amazing of all: Why did he keep the manuscript for more than thirty years, a key with it? One thinks of the fabled ostrich who buries his head in the sand. The problem of Pepys still remains unsolved, in spite of the efforts of Stevenson in _Familiar Studies of Men and Books_. Stevenson was the last man in the world to understand Pepys, but more competent exegetists have tried and failed. One can only say that his failing sight--which Professor Osborne of Melbourne attributes to astigmatism--has deprived the world of a treasure that can never be sufficiently regretted. No man can be considered educated who has not read at least part of the Diary; in no other way is it possible to get so vivid a picture of the ordinary people of a past age; as we read they seem to live before us, and it comes as a shock to remember that poor Pall Pepys--his plain sister--and “my wife” and Mrs. Batelier--“my pretty valentine”--and Sir William Coventry and Mercer,