Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 5, 1895 - Miscellanies, Volume II

SAMUEL PEPYS
was the nature of the pose ? Had he suppressed all
mention of the book, or had he bought it, gloried in
the act, and cheerfully recorded his glorification, in
either case we should have made him out. But no ;
he is full of precautions to conceal the ' disgrace ' of
the purchase, and yet speeds to chronicle the whole
affair in pen and ink. It is a sort of anomaly in
human action, which we can exactly parallel from
another part of the Diary.
Mrs. Pepys had written a paper of her too just
complaints against her husband, and written it in
plain and very pungent English. Pepys, in an
agony lest the world should come to see it, brutally
seizes and destroys the tell-tale document ; and then
— you disbelieve your eyes — down goes the whole
story with unsparing truth and in the cruellest detail.
It seems he has no design but to appear respectable,
and here he keeps a private book to prove he was
not. You are at first faintly reminded of some of
the vagaries of the morbid religious diarist ; but at
a moment's thought the resemblance disappears.
The design of Pepys is not at all to edify ; it is not
from repentance that he chronicles his peccadilloes,
for he tells us when he does repent, and, to be just
to him, there often follows some improvement.
Again, the sins of the religious diarist are of a very
formal pattern, and are told with an elaborate whine.
But in Pepys you come upon good, substantive mis-
demeanours ; beams in his eye of which he alone
remains unconscious ; healthy outbreaks of the
animal nature, and laughable subterfuges to himself
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