If the principal interest of this famous diary lies in its unflinching revelation of character, a charm no less enduring may be found in all the daily incidents it narrates. We like to know how a citizen of London lived two hundred years ago: what clothes he wore, what food he ate, what books he read, what plays he heard, what work and pleasure filled his waking hours. And I would gently suggest to those who hunger and thirst after the glories of the printed page that if they will only consent to write for posterity,--not as the poets say they do, and do not, but as the diarist really and truly does,--posterity will take them to its heart and cherish them. They may have nothing to say which anybody wants to listen to now; but let them jot down truthfully the petty occurrences, the pleasant details of town or country life, and, as surely as the world lasts, they will one day have a hearing. We live in a strange period of transition. Never before has the old order changed as rapidly as it is changing now. O writers of dull verse and duller prose, quit the well-worked field of fiction, the arid waste of sonnets and sad poems, and chronicle in little leather-covered books the incidents which tell their wondrous tale of resistless and inevitable change. Write of electric motors, of bicycles, of peace societies, of hospitals for pussy cats, of women’s clubs and colleges, of the price of food and house rent, of hotel bills, of new fashions in dress and furniture, of gay dinners, of extension lectures, of municipal corruption and reform, of robberies unpunished, of murders unavenged. These things do not interest us profoundly now, being part of our daily surroundings; but the generations that are to come will read of them with mingled envy and derision: envy because we have done so little, derision because we think that we have done so much.