It is this wholesome and universal love of detail which lends to a veracious diary its indestructible charm. Charlotte Burney has less to tell us than her famous sister; but it is to her, after all, that we owe our knowledge of Dr. Johnson’s worsted wig,--a present, it seems, from Mr. Thrale, and especially valued for its tendency to stay in curl however roughly used. “The doctor generally diverts himself with lying down just after he has got a fresh wig on,” writes Charlotte gayly; and this habit, it must be admitted, is death and destruction to less enduring perukes. Swift’s Journal to Stella--a true diary, though cast in the form of correspondence--shows us not only the playful, tender, and caressing moods of the most savage of English cynics, but also enlightens us amazingly as to his daily habits and economies. We learn from his own pen how he bought his fuel by the half-bushel, and would have been glad to buy it by the pound; how his servant, “that extravagant whelp Peter,” insisted on making a fire for him, and necessitated his picking off the coals one by one, before going to bed; how he drank brandy every morning, and took his pill as regularly as Mrs. Pullet every night; and how Stella’s mother sent him as gifts “a parcel of wax candles and a bandbox full of small plum-cakes,” on which plum-cakes--oh, miracle of sound digestion!--he breakfasted serenely for a fortnight. Now, the spectacle of Dr. Swift eating plum-cakes in the early morning is like the spectacle of Mr. Pepys dining with far less inward satisfaction at his cousin’s table, where “the venison pasty was palpable beef.” The most remarkable diary in the world is rich in the insignificance of its details. It is the sole confidant of a man who, as Mr. Lang admirably says, was his own Boswell, and its ruthless sincerity throws the truth-telling of the great biographer into the shade. Were it not for this strange cipher record, ten years long, the world--or that small portion of it which reads history unabridged--would know Mr. Samuel Pepys, secretary to the Admiralty, as an excellent public servant, loyal, capable, and discreet. The bigger, lazier world, to which he is now a figure so familiar, would never have heard of him at all, thereby losing the most vivid bit of human portraiture ever given for our disedification and delight.