carried on so long, and so fortunately preserved, or to lament that it was not continued throughout the periods of the Popish Plot and the Rye House Plot, of Monmouth's rising, and of the Revolution. The _Diary_ extends from January 1st, 1660, to May 31st, 1669, when Pepys writes, 'And thus ends all that I doubt I shall ever be able to do with my own eyes in the keeping of my journal.' He recovered his sight, at least to a great extent, but the habit was broken, and never resumed. He had in the interim seen and described the Restoration, the Great Plague, the Great Fire, and the great disaster of 1667, when the Dutch burned the English fleet in the Medway. During this time he had seen continually and been on terms more or less intimate with Charles II., the Duke of York, Monk, Clarendon, Sandwich, Shaftesbury, Sir William Coventry, and a multitude of persons of lower degree of almost every class of society except the Puritans, who are only represented by his worthy predecessor in office, Mr. Blackburne. He has displayed himself to us in almost every possible attitude, attending to accounts, drafting state papers, measuring the timber in the dockyards, giving and taking bribes, defending himself before the House of Commons, alternately a Mercury and a Mentor to his patron, dissipating at the theatre, flirting and something more with actresses and pretty servants, helping to set the Royal Society going, sitting for his portrait, practising music, buying and binding books, a perfect Proteus, yet always the same Pepys, a true type of his age in its peculiar idiosyncrasies, and of human nature in its essential sameness, heroic in no respect, yet admirable in many, and, with many meannesses, by no means despicable, as good an example as can be found of the truth of Goethe's dictum: 'Ein guter Mensch in seinem dunkeln Drange Ist sich des rechten Weges wohl bewusst.' It is impossible to pass over so unique a work as the _Diary_ without extract, yet extracts can only convey the impression of bricks from a building. The following have been selected chiefly with reference to their incomparable quaintness and raciness, the one grace which our literature has forfeited without hope of recovery. '_July 18, 1660._ Thence to my Lord about business, and being in talk in comes one with half a buck from Hinchinbroke, and it smelling a little strong my Lord did give it to me. I did carry it to my mother.