a long look at the wide expanse of beautifully wooded landscape. Perhaps he walked through the lanes and fields with his favorite dogs. Few men knew not only his own county, but rural England better. On circuit he had always made it a point to take long walks, and to see everything worth seeing near an assize town. He was particularly fond of swimming. When he went the Northern Circuit for the first time in the summer of 1856, he and his brother judge, Mr. Justice Willes, spent a Sunday in climbing Helvellyn, and in the course of the day bathed four or five times. The local newspapers denounced the judges for not attending church in the usual way; and the baron was with difficulty persuaded not to have it out with the newspapers. All the cottagers about Four Elms knew him. He was their friend and counsellor, and to him they looked for assistance in difficulties. Neighbors would appeal to him to settle knotty questions as to fixtures or boundaries; and perhaps part of the day would be spent in a drive or walk to view the place in dispute. One who knew him well, speaking of his fondness for billiards, adds that he "would put down his cue in the middle of a break to listen to the sorrows of a poor neighbor." In the evening he would read the Times, and the hours would slip by as he played on the piano the greater part of a favorite opera, until, by half past nine or ten he retired for the night, a long night, for in his busiest days he took nine hours' sleep. Like most men of vigorous intellect, he read widely. He knew the Bible as few Englishmen did. At seventy-three he mastered Spanish, and read Cervantes in the original. Occasionally, though not often, he, who as a judge was, to use his own saying, "a magistrate in every county in England," attended the local sessions when it was known that a particularly difficult point was to be raised before the justices.

Open-hearted and open-handed to the unpretending, ready to spend hours and write endless letters in helping to redress a poor neighbor's wrongs, he

could be frigidly dignified to pretenders. He had a strong aversion to promiscuous shaking of hands, and those who knew him were often amused by watching his efforts to avoid contact with a too effusive admirer. In later years honest, sincere, unpretending discussion was his greatest delight. Not even Dr. Johnson took more pleasure in full, unconstrained, well-informed talk. With the youngest barrister he would discuss a legal point in the same way as he would with a brother member of the Court of Appeal. He needed no robes or wig to protect his dignity. It was said of him that, even when a judge of the Court of Appeal, his sight was so good that he could perceive a County Court judge many yards off.

Legal distinction is sometimes bought at a great price. It may mean the shrivelling up of the best faculties, penury as to true knowledge, limited vision, narrow sympathies. Distinction so purchased was not Lord Bramwell's. Altogether a full, useful and real life was his—a life bringing in a rich harvest of friends, and accumulating as it went on the memory of things well done. Happy are the singleminded, they who have few doubts, and yet honestly have sought the truth, who have always found their duty to their hand and done it with diligence. Such happiness was his; few had more of it.

JOHN MACDONELL.

From Macmillan's Magazine. THE MAN PEPYS.

The perennial attractiveness of fiction is due in no small degree to the gratification we all derive from being able to view the private actions of others, while ourselves unobserved. In the ordinary way of existence we see men and women only in part. We know they are not quite what they seem, and certainly not what they wish us to think them. Offer to the normal man the chance of seeing another in his most intimate privacy, and he will seize it with alacrity, experiencing

more genuine delight in the revelation than if he were unearthing an unsuspected treasure in his garden. Something of this pleasure we find in reading fiction; the amount of it is a measure of the writer's skill in his craft. For, so far as an author in describing what his personages do can convey simultaneously a clear idea of why they do it, to that extent they become real and engage our interest. Wherever the description of actions is not informed by their essential motive the characters may in a way be interesting, but they are not real; or if by supplementary disquisition it is sought to prove them real, they are not interesting. This imbuing of the Ideed with the motive is the true secret of story telling; it flatters the careful reader with a sense of his powers of apprehension, and pleasurably surprises the cursory reader by the absence of anything to skip.

And if this be the highest achievement of a writer of stories, what shall be said of a man who has attained to it in regard to himself, who has set down in a book the actions of his own life, without morbid reflection or analytic apology, clear, simple, essential? The thing would appear impossible if it were not here before us in the diary of Samuel Pepys, now that the document is printed for the first time in its entirety. That it is here there can be no manner of doubt, and it is perfectly certain that the thing is unique and convincing. The world is not poor in the matter of autobiographical writings. Montaigne, Cellini, Rousseau, and in a sense Goethe, are all notable men 'who have taken us into their privacy and discoursed to us of their deeds. But, however distinct their methods, they have this in common: to us who read, and upon whom their eye was while they wrote, they are constructing rather than revealing themselves. The essential truth of what they choose to tell us is adulterated by the consideration that they are producing a set of impressions; they select and adjust; their actions and motives are

placed in fanciful, or at least artistic, relations with other motives and actions. Further, they consciously carry along with them a set of moral problems; in greater or less degree the immensities cloud their narratives; and they are all the time performing, as by anticipation, the work of final judgment. If Samuel Pepys had not kept a diary, or, having kept it, if he had burned it before he died, as seems to have been his intention, it might have been contended that no man could write of himself save in this compound way. The complete diary comes with proof to the contrary. The historical matter remains valuable as before; the official records and personages are as curious as ever, but by virtue of the additional matter the centre of interest is changed, and for the first time Pepys himself stands forth as the principal topic, clear, unmistakable, true. As we read there is forced upon us the conviction of a man painted as never man was painted before, by a method the very simplicity of which conceals its almost miraculous success.

Pepys's official position was that of clerk of the acts on the Navy Board; when he commenced this diary he made himself clerk of quite another set of acts, his own. The qualities of precision, orderliness, and perspicacity which made him a successful administrator also made him a more than successful diarist; but what is chiefly remarkable is that the method which served him so well for his office is made by him to suffice for his own deeds. So far as the accuracy of the record is concerned he, speaking of himself, might have been an official abstraction, an impersonal item of humanity represented as I. For the first and only time in a printed book the genuine I may be looked upon as merely a cognomen, carrying with it no apologetic or judicial function. It simply equals Samuel Pepys, whom you may have heard of as of anybody else. He speaks of himself, what he does, and sometimes what he thinks, as if he were a disinterested

plication; there you have him, the whole of him, nothing omitted-the entire gamut of a living man from his stomach to what he imagined to be his conscience. By this diary Pepys has recommended himself variously as vivacious, artless, a delightful gossip, and so forth; but these terms are altogether misapplied, for they assume the relations of an author and his read ers, between Pepys and those who now peruse his diary. They take for granted the self-consciousness of a writer with his eye on a public, the selection of phrases, the adjustment of incidents. But there is in fact nothing such. It is abundantly evident that Pepys wrote this daily record for himself only. He had a purpose, though what it was must remain doubtful; and he was impelled by a motive, which is to be found in the nature of the man himself, if we could but correlate it there with, and realize it clearly. To do so fully would be to accomplish the most difficult thing in heaven or earth; but Pepys has supplied us more amply and more intelligently with the means of doing so than any other man who has written of himself. The diary is the work of one who evidently conceived that just as he was accustomed to record in succinct memoranda the day's transactions at the Navy Board, so he could set down in a brief essential abstract the act and spirit of his particular life. Here in short you have a précis of existence as it was to one human being, a précis of such surpassing clearness and simplicity that it seems strange its wonderful success should not earlier have brought about the publication of the entire diary. But now if there be any readers, as there must be many, to whom the unfeigned disclosure of one authentic

human being is of more interest than the dubious operations of masses of men called history, here indeed they have spread for them a regal feast. Doubtless such readers will have bring with them both sympathy and imagination. Read currently a page of the diary seems the barest recital

to

revelation of self that makes the sympathetic reader shrink as from his own ghost. The shorthand in which he wrote his journal is as nothing to the rapid condensed stenography of his self-exposition. Let any one who thinks the method easy attempt to do the like by himself. He will take four pages to Pepys's one, and cumber the narrative with such explanations and apologies, allowing that he has the courage to deal with himself as Pepys did, which is allowing much, that the result will be mere mental fog. It is nothing to the point to say that Pepys was not a complex man. He was a man like the rest of us; he did the things we do, thought many of the things we think, and in dealing with what to him was real he conveys with inevitable force the measure of truth which that represents. Many lives are not so complex as they are confused; there was no confusion in Mr. Pepys's vision, and none in his ideas.

He owed his official position to Sir Edward Montagu, afterwards Earl of Sandwich. In time he proved eminently fitted for it; but observe how he sets forth his own qualifications: "This place I got by chance, and my Lord did give it me by chance, neither he nor I thinking it to be of the worth that he and I find it to be. Never since I was a man in the world was I ever so great a stranger to public affairs as I now am, having not read a new book or anything like it, or enquiring after any news, or what the Parliament do, or in any wise how things go." If any one had written this of Mr. Pepys it would be held to be a severe indictment; that he should write it of himself, voluntarily, for nothing, is a thing as remarkable as it is rare. Humanity does not care to sum itself up in this way. This is the kind of consideration it puts out of sight and willingly forgets. Samuel Pepys sets it down with quite unfeeling precision. He has no weakness on his own account; it is a fact, that is all. Had he proceeded by way of cheap moralizing, we might have

paper," and making, as if for the recording angel, an admirable précis of his own misdeeds. The amazing nature of the achievement is made very evident when one considers that the prin、 cipal condition precedent of remorse is a clear idea of wrong-doing; we repent when we see (usually by the aid of another's vision) the exact nature and conditions of our actions. Mr. Pepys does not repent; he merely records. Had he felt repentance he would have recorded that also. He does repent of various things in the course of his diary, but a few pages further on you will find he does them again. Most men in these circumstances would turn back and cancel the entry of repentance, or more probably would omit the instances of infraction. That seems the only selfrespecting way of keeping a diary of personal morals. Whatever Mr. Pepys's opinion of himself in this respect may have been does not clearly appear; but one thing is past doubt, the materials he preserved for forming one are ample and true. There is nothing to show, however, that he had any such purpose; that is left for us who do not keep diaries. He simply records, passing quite placidly from peculation to "dinner with my father and wife."

It seems a strange freak of the unseen to endow this unimaginative, unreflective man with the faculty of observing his proper self as a detached object, and of setting down his deeds and thoughts as if he, the writer, were not the doer. The more we read the more it looks like a practical joke on humanity, as if some coterie of spirits had conspired and said: Let us provide this man with the power of seeing himself precisely as he is, and the desire to write down what he sees. He will take it seriously, and it will be sport to observe the precision with which he will set forth what he believes he comprehends. Some such supposition seems necessary to account for the marvellous fidelity of the record and the absence of all sense of moral contrast or humor. Towards Christmas time of 1664 there comes bunched together a number of entries of such ludicrous

incongruity that it does not appear possible a man could calmly write them, or allow them to remain. "Going to bed betimes last night we waked betimes and from our people's being forced to take the key to go out to light a candle, I was very angry and begun to find fault with my wife for not commanding her servants as she ought. There upon she giving me some cross answer I did strike her over her left eye such a blow as the poor wretch did cry out and was in great pain, but yet her spirit was such as to endeavor to bite and scratch me. But I coying with her made her cease crying, and sent for butter and parsley, and friends presently with one another, and I up, vexed at my heart to think what I had done, for she was forced to lay a poultice to her eye all day, and is black, and the people of the house observed it." What should impel a man to write out in full an incident like this is a mystery on any ordinary estimate of humanity; but when, having dealt so by his own wife, he proceeds to relate how later in the day he keeps a disgraceful tryst with the wife of one Bagwell, an underling in the Deptford yard, and how he fares therein, the reader is impelled to fall back on the assumption of the unseen powers. For there is, and can be, no reason why a man should wish to remember such things; if some jocular spirits did not impel him for their amusement to do so, it is clear he would choose to forget. But Samuel records faithfully. Next day (his wife's eye being bad, though she in good temper with him, poor thing!) he has further deeds of iniquity to record with Bagwell's wife. Looking out for the comet which was then surprising England, he reaches Christmas Day. "Up (my wife's eye being ill still of the blow I did in a passion give her on Monday last) to church alone, where Mr. Mills, a good sermon." ." After dinner, "To the French Church, but coming too late I returned, and to Mr. Rawlinson's church where I heard a good sermon of one that I remember was at Paul's with me, his name Maggett; and very great store of fine women