good conscience unless you choose; keep all three, Antony, throughout
your life, and you will be happy yourself and make everyone about you
happy, and that is to make a little heaven of your earthly home.

Your loving old
G.P.



9


MY DEAR ANTONY,

Some day, no doubt, you will read some of the celebrated diaries that
have come down to us. The best known of such books is _Pepys's
Diary_ which was written in a kind of shorthand, and so lay
undeciphered from his death in 1703 for more than a century. One of
its merits is its absolute self-revelation; for Pepys exposes to us his
character without a shadow of reserve in all its vanity; and the other is
the faithful picture it gives us of the time of the Restoration.

But, though less popular, _Evelyn's Diary_ is, I think, in many ways
superior to that of Pepys.[1]

There is a quiet, unostentatious dignity about Evelyn which is
altogether absent in the garrulous Pepys, and, indeed I find something
very beautiful and touching in the grief Evelyn pours forth upon the
death of his little son of five years old:--