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

SAMUEL PEPYS
merry in, in Captain Holland's time ; ' and after
revisiting the Nasehy, now changed into the Charles,
he confesses ' it was a great pleasure to myself to see
the ship that I began my good fortune in.' The
stone that he was cut for he preserved in a case ;
and to the Turners he kept aUve such gratitude for
their assistance, that for years, and after he had begun
to mount himself into higher zones, he continued to
have that family to dinner on the anniversary of the
operation. Not HazHtt nor Rousseau had a more
romantic passion for their past, although at times
they might express it more romantically ; and if
Pepys shared with them this childish fondness, did
not Rousseau, who left behind him the Confessions,
or Hazlitt, who wrote the Liber Amoris, and loaded
his essays with loving personal detail, share with
Pepys in his unwearied egotism ? For the two
things go hand in hand ; or, to be more exact, it is
the first that makes the second either possible oi
pleasing.
But, to be quite in sympathy with Pepys, we
must return once more to the experience of children.
I can remember to have written, in the fly-leaf of
more than one book, the date and the place where I
then was — if, for instance, I was ill in bed or sitting
in a certain garden ; these were jottings for my
future self; if I should chance on such a note in
after years, I thought it would cause me a particular
thrill to recognise myself across the intervening
distance. Indeed, I might come upon them now,
and not be moved one tittle — which shows that I
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