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

MEN AND BOOKS
behaviour, we too often weave a tissue of romantic
compliments and dull excuses ; and even if Pepys
were the ass and coward that men call him, we must
take rank as sillier and more cowardly than he. The
bald truth about oneself, what we are all too timid
to admit when we are not too dull to see it, that was
what he saw clearly and set down unsparingly.
It is improbable that the Diary can have been
carried on in the same single spirit in which it was
begun. Pepys was not such an ass, but he must
have perceived, as he went on, the extraordinary
nature of the work he was producing. He was a
great reader, and he knew what other books were
like. It must, at least, have crossed his mind that
some one might ultimately decipher the manuscript,
and he himself, with all his pains and pleasures, be
resuscitated in some later day ; and the thought,
although discouraged, must have warmed his heart.
He was not such an ass, besides, but he must have
been conscious of the deadly explosives, the gun-
cotton and the giant powder, he was hoarding in his
drawer. Let some contemporary light upon the
Journal, and Pepys was plunged for ever in social
and political disgrace. We can trace the growth of
his terrors by two facts. In 1660, while the Diary
was still in its youth, he tells about it, as a matter
of course, to a lieutenant in the navy ; but in 1669,
when it was already near an end, he could have
bitten his tongue out, as the saying is, because he
had let slip his secret to one so grave and friendly
as Sir William Coventry. And from two other facts
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