Excerpt from Passages From the Diary of Samuel Pepys: Edited and With an Introduction by Richard Le Gallienne

Vivid, unconscious writing, it is infinitely delight ful and precious, scarcely to be over-valued. One reason, of course, for this is that its writer had no idea of making a book at all. It 15 plain beyond doubt 5 that he never dreamed of human eyes falling upon his blessedly frank and naked page. The record was a secret between himself and his own soul, not for getting his God, - whom, as will be seen, he is far from forgetting, and whom he invokes on many curi ous occasions. Most diarists have written with an eye to publication, or, at all events, with the fear before them of posthumous inspection by the family. They have, therefore, more or less posed themselves, as they would have others see them. Most of us have kept diaries in our youth. They are for most people merely the pool of Narcissus. With that dwindling sense of our own importance, as contrasted say with the planet Jupiter, which comes with maturity, most of us have abandoned them. With the abdication of the ego, they become tiresome to us, and absurdly self-important. Pepys, however, though certainly not an egoist, in our modern sense of the word, never lost interest in himself or his affairs. That may per haps be regarded as one of the many signs of that robust health of mind and body with which his diary abounds. But it is a childlike, boyish interest. It is not so much himself that interests him, nor merely the things that happen to himself, but the people about him and the things that are happening to everybody, all the time, to his nation as well as to his acquaint-7.

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