We can understand how Mr. Pepys found time to write his diary when we remember that he was commonly in his office by four o’clock in the morning. We can appreciate its wonderful candor when we realize how safe he thought it from investigation. With the reproaches of his own conscience he was probably familiar, and the crowning cowardice of self-told lies offered no temptation to him. “Why should we seek to be deceived?” asks Bishop Butler, and Mr. Pepys might have answered truthfully that he didn’t. The romantic shading, the flimsy and false excuses with which we are wont to color our inmost thoughts, have no place in this extraordinary chronicle. Its writer neither deludes himself, like Bunyan, nor bolsters up his soul, like Rousseau, with swelling and insidious pretenses. It is a true “Human Document,” full of meanness and kindness, of palpable virtues and substantial misdemeanors. Mr. Pepys is unkind to his wife, yet he loves her. He is selfish and ostentatious, yet he denies himself the coveted glory of a coach and pair to give a marriage portion to his sister. He seeks openly his own profit and gratification, yet he is never without an active interest in the lives and needs of other people. Indeed, so keen and so sensible are his solutions of social problems, or what passed for such in that easy age, that had philanthropy and its rewards been invented in the reign of Charles II. we should doubtless see standing now in London streets a statue of Mr. Samuel Pepys, prison reformer, and founder of benevolent institutions for improving and harrowing the poor.