wrapped his great book in the secrecy of a cipher, as though he meant no
other eye ever to read it but his own, perplex their brains unnecessarily.
Pepys was not the first human being to make his confession in an empty
confessional. Criminals, lovers and other egoists, for lack of a priest,
will make their confessions to a stone wall or a tree. There is no more
mystery in it than in the singing of birds. The motive may be either to
obtain discharge from the sense of guilt or a desire to save and store up
the very echoes and last drops of pleasure. Human beings keep diaries for
as many different reasons as they write lyric poems. With Pepys, I fancy,
the main motive was a simple happiness in chewing the cud of pleasure.
The fact that so much of his pleasure had to be kept secret from the world
made it all the more necessary for him to babble when alone. True, in the
early days his confidences are innocent enough. Pepys began to write in
cipher some time before there was any purpose in it save the common
prudence of a secretive man. Having built, however, this secret and
solitary fastness, he gradually became more daring. He had discovered a
room to the walls of which he dared speak aloud. Here we see the
respectable man liberated. He no longer needs to be on his official
behaviour, but may play the part of a small Nero, if he wishes, behind the
safety of shorthand. And how he takes advantage of his opportunities! He
remains to the end something of a Puritan in his standards and his public
carriage, but in his diary he reveals himself as a pig from the sty of
Epicurus, naked and only half-ashamed. He never, it must be admitted,
entirely shakes off his timidity. At a crisis he dare not confess in
English even in a cipher, but puts the worst in bad French with a blush.
In some instances the French may be for facetiousness rather than
concealment, as in the reference to the ladies of Rochester Castle in
1665:

Thence to Rochester, walked to the Crowne, and while dinner was