pretty wife, "poor wretch," of whom he stood in some awe; and yet this
inconsistent naval secretary liked to flit from flower to flower. He was
vain, greedy, wanton, fond of the delight of the eye and the pride of
life; he was loving and loose in his manners; he was pious, repentant,
profligate; and he deliberately told the whole tale of all his many
changes of mood and mistress, of piety and pleasure. One cannot open
Pepys at random without finding him at his delightful old games. On the
Lord's day he goes to church with Mr. Creed, and hears a good sermon from
the red-faced parson. He came home, read divinity, dined, and, he says,
"played the fool," and won a quart of sack from Mr. Creed. Then to
supper at the Banquet House, and there Mr. Pepys and his wife fell to
quarrelling over the beauty of Mrs. Pierce; "she against, and I for,"
says superfluous Pepys. No one is in the least likely to suspect that
Mrs. Pepys was angry with her lord because he did not think Mrs. Pierce a
beauty.

How living the whole story is! One can smell the flowers of that Sunday
in May, and the roast beef. The sack seems but newly drawn, the red
cheeks of Mrs. Pierce as fresh as ever. The flowers grow over them now,
or the church floor covers them; the sack is drunk, the roast beef is
eaten, the quarrel is over; the beauty and the red-faced parson, the
husband and wife, they are all with Tullus and Ancus. _Pulvis et
umbra_--that is the moral of "Pepys's Diary." Life yet lives so strong
in the cyphered pages; all the colour, all the mirth, all the little
troubles and sins, and vows, they are so real they might be of yesterday
or to-day, but the end of them came nigh two hundred years ago.
Therefore, to read Pepys is to enjoy our own brief innings better, as men
who know that our March is passing where Pepys' May has flown before, and
that we shall soon be with him and his wife, and the Scot, and the red-
faced parson. So fleeting is life, whose record outlives it for ever; so