there is in this church, more than I know anywhere else about us." There is really no conscious humor in the juxtaposition of sermons and fine women; it is merely the extraordinary man's way of recording what he saw, what appealed to him. He holds on his even path, impelled by the mysterious necessity of writing himself down until he comes to the last day of the year, when piety and precision dictate to him the following towards the solemn hour of midnight: "Well satisfied with my work, and above all, to find myself, by the great blessing of God, worth £1,349, by which, as I have spent very largely, so I have laid up above £500 this year above what I was worth this day twelve-month. The Lord make me forever thankful to his holy name for it!" Remember the methods by which Samuel Pepys accumulated this sum, how his wife's eye is still black from his cowardly blow, what other wrongs he has done to her, the fine women in church, and then ask by what strange freak he can add expressions of piety to such a jumble of living, and put the whole thing down in a diary in language of most admirable vividness, without the slightest sign of consciousness that he is doing anything unusual. The much-praised art of Fielding in painting a man, a whole man, is as nothing to this, for here we have Samuel Pepys painting himself in a way that makes Tom Jones pale by comparison. One glimpse of self, such as those one finds so plentifully strewn over the diary, drives many a man to abject remorse. Mr. Pepys the chronicler sits calm in the midst of it all, apparently quite heedless of the picture of Pepys the man. Nowhere else in literature will you find a man who to the same extent possessed the faculty to see what he lacked the faculty to appreciate, and from that point of view he remains a puzzle. Shakespeare himself has left nothing which can compare in truth and vividness with the revelation of the jealousy caused to Pepys by the dancing-master's attendances on his wife. It is a comedy of the highest order, every touch perfect and convincing. Pepys himself surpasses it in the tragi-comedy of his relations with Deb, his wife's maid. Here is no invention, no labored ingenuity, but a succession of scenes of absolute truth, set forth in language of remarkable force, wherein there is not a superfluous phrase. Pepys does not speak with great appreciation of such of Shakespeare's plays as he saw performed; but it is almost certain that could Shakespeare have seen this diary he would have paid. it the true tribute of dramatizing portions of it, taking from it, as he never scrupled to do where his source was: worthy, expressions which he could not hope to improve. Of such it is a rich mine. The simple directness which the translators of the English Bible wielded to so glorious purpose hangs about it.. "After we had filled our bellies with cream we took our leaves and away," he says of a country feast. A friend invites him to dinner, which he enjoys, "only the venison pasty was palpable beef, which was not handsome." Hecan sketch a country idyll in a few words: "To-day I received a letter from my uncle to beg an old fiddle of me for my cousin Perkin, the miller, whose mill the wind hath lately broke down, and now he hath nothing to live by but fiddling, and he must needs have it against Whitsuntide to play to the country girls." We seem to have lost this delightful knack of language nowadays; it is as rhythmic as a song, and as sufficient. What follows is pure Pepys: "But it vexed me to see how my uncle writes to me, as if he were not able to send him one. But I intend to-morrow to send him one." "Put in at my Lord's lodgings where we stayed late, eating of part of his turkey-pie and reading of Quarles's 'Emblems."" have Mr. Pepys in short, the proportion being seven parts pie to one part Emblems. He imbibed enough of Em-blems and divinity to enable him to. moralize a little, as when he says: "So I see that religion, be it what it will, fs but a humor, and so the esteem of it passeth as other things do;" where the beauty of the language seems to convey There you' a deeper sense than was in his mind. This is a rare mood with him, however, and never in the least diverts him from his mysterious task of laying bare himself. Of a certain Captain Holmes he says he is "a cunning fellow, and one (by his own confession to me) that can put on two several faces, and look his enemies in the face with as much love as his friends. But, good God! what an age is this! that a man cannot live with out playing the knave and dissimulation." The age was not peculiar in respect of this fancied necessity to dissimulate; so many mere tricks in personal morality are put down to the When Mr. -compulsion of the age. Pepys dons his heaven-sent diarist's robe and takes himself in hand, he shows with his customary clearness exactly how the matter stands, age or no age: "I told him (Mr. Starling) how I would have him speak to my uncle Robert, when he comes thither concerning my buying of land, that I could pay ready money £600 and the rest by £150 per annum, to make up as much as will buy £50 per annum, which I do, although I not worth above £500 ready money, that he may think me to be a And again: greater saver than I am.” "It is a great pleasure to me to talk with persons of quality and to be in command (at his office), and I give it out among them that the estate left me is £200 a year in land, besides moneys, because I would put an esteem upon myself." He succeeded to admiration in creating an esteem for himself; he even acquired a reputation as a highly respectable, pious, and God-fearing man; but he also kept a diary in a way absolutely inimical to this repute, and yet never once will you detect any evidence of his tongue being in his cheek. Was he morally blind? Mentally blind he was not; rather in this respect he had one of the most splendid gifts of vision man was ever dowered with. The mere external aspect of a thing or act appealed to him in his fullest extent; but of moral vision, contrast, perspective, in a word, humor, he appears to have had nought. Possessing all the follies of a Falstaff, he sees them as He is capable of a little complex reflec- What a subject for an Imaginary Conversation, Shakespeare and Samuel Pepys! To Shakespeare the world was "full of strange noises;" men and women were on a journey from eternity to eternity, and their loves and hates, ambitions and failures were imbued with the enchantment of destiny, so that, while all they do or say seems proper to them as individuals, it is but the manifestation of a power or process of which they are the unwitting mediums. To Pepys they are comprehensible men and women, with no other matter of destiny about them than birth and death. These mysteries he makes branch, so that the wood was rotten; no pretence to solve, or dilate upon; and not more than five feet from the they are mere memoranda for him, like ground, so that I could watch them the pickled herrings he dines off at easily. Of course, I had to widen the Greenwich. The world for Pepys is orifice before I could remove the most effectually real; he has an unyoungster. The snake-like twist they hesitating persuasion of himself and can give to their neck, and their why he exists; and in this diary he snake-like hiss, make them rather unreverses the Eastern magic that made canny birds, and may account for a genius spread cloud-like out of an urn, their use in divination by Greek wizby industriously stuffing a genius into one. In his observation of the crude ards. They were spread-eagled on a matter that makes up living, the wheel, and turned, or perhaps whirled, succedaneum of spirit, he reveals an round. Simætha, in Theocritus, uses unmatchable exactitude. Page after such a wheel to charm back her faithpage is blindly filled with the stuff of less lover, Delphis. The poor birds comedy, lying there as mere facts, must have rejoiced at the advent of dockets of the conveyance of existence Christianity, modern Christian witches from the Eternal lessor to Samuel preferring to conjure with robins and Pepys, tenant for life. other birds of bright plumage. He lived to the age of seventy, and an after-death examination revealed a nest of seven stones in one of his kid: neys, any one of which might have proved mortal to an ordinary man. But they were Pepysian stones, and had arranged themselves so conveniently as not seriously to derange his bodily functions. The State owed him £48,000 which it never paid, in which counterpoise of dishonesty the operation of moral justice may be visible. Pepys's observation on the point is necessarily wanting; he had gone where diaries were no longer requisite; and yet, but for irreverence, one might imagine him calmly resuming his notes in Eternity: "This day did blow the last trump. Gabriel a fine figure. trumpet somewhat out of tune." From The Cornhill Magazine. July 1st. The young wrynecks, alas! are dead, no doubt killed by their parents through my folly in taking one out of the nest. They are very uncommon birds in the neighborhood, hence my wish to examine them. They dug their hole in an old appletree just below where it had lost a 2nd. The Agricultural Rating Bill passed its third reading by two county Radical votes over the government majority. The committee debates have slowly exhibited, or perhaps evolved, the government position, at last clearly stated by Mr. Balfour in his concluding speech, that the bill is meant not only to relieve a greatly distressed industry in redemption of election pledges, but also as a contribution towards remedying the present monstrous injustice in the assessment to local rates. The Spectator deserves much credit for keeping this side of the question uppermost. It is to be hoped that the government will sooner or later overhaul the whole bad business, but not without more deliberation than they thought necessary before overhauling our educational system. The Janus-faced contention of the Opposition that the proposed relief is, as regards the landowners, an enormous subsidy, but as regards the agricultural interest generally a drop in the bucket, reminds me of an ancient story about a little girl and a piece of cake: Little girl: Is that large piece of cake for grandfather? Mamma: No, dear, for you. Little girl: What a small piece of cake! The new vicar, who is not so good a Conservative as we could wish, is indignant with the government for not allowing the relief to the clergy, who are notoriously "over-rated," on tithe rent charge. At present, he tells me, he pays half as much rates as Tom; and when the act comes into operation he will pay exactly the same amount, for Tom, who farms his own land, will get the reduction. This certainly seems preposterous in regard, for example, to the road-rate, for Tom wears the roads much more with his carriage horses and plough-teams than the vicar with his one pony and "humble vehicle." 4th.-A curious example presented itself this morning of our growing sensitiveness to criticism, and also of our ready invention in the manufacture of scandal. A person who makes mineral water at some distance from here sent in his card and asked to see me, and on being shown into the library began this catechism: "Sir, did you pay a visit to last Friday week? Did you stop to lunch? Did you say at lunch that my soda water was enough to give everybody typhus fever?" I endeavored to persuade the little man that he was misinformed, that I did not so much as know that he existed; still less, if possible, that he made mineral waters; that I could not, therefore, have censured them; and that so far as my memory served the topic did not arise; so that his friend the footman must have confused two people and two occasions. I then warned him that perhaps the circulation of such a report was not the most advantageous form of self-advertisement, because a man's mineral water should be not only pure, but above suspicion. He left in some excitement, generously accepting my disclaimer, but determined to find the truth somehow I was tempted to suggest that he might find the truth at the bottom of his well, but he I would not have understood. Poor lady! No wonder Lucian thought her wan and washed out in complexion; but it would be a pity she should have typhus. 6th. The garden sundial came unriveted from its pedestal some months ago, and has been laid aside ever since, as it seemed to the ladies a pity to lose the opportunity of decorating it with a motto. We are all gone crazy about mottoes in this part of the world. Every new house that is built must have its motto, and the selection gives a good deal of entertainment both to the house-builders and their neighbors. Well, fashion must be followed, so this morning I have been reading through Mrs. Gatty's collection of sundial mottoes, being stimulated to industry by my stop-gap gar-. dener's inquiry whether he might not put a pot of hydrangeas on the pedestal. So I explained its purpose. The best mottoes seem to be the best known, such as-"Non nisi cœlesti radio," "Horas non numero nisi serenas," "Pereunt et imputantur," but one cannot use these. A favorite device was to print "we shall," and leave “di(e)—al(l)” to be supplied by the local wits; but that is too macabre. I remember an uncle of mine choosing "Sensim sine sensu" from the "De Senectute," and being very indignant with a friend of his, a fine scholar, who tried to convince him that he had pitched upon an interpolation. On the whole, I doubt if I shall find anything better than my first idea of "Cogitavi dies antiquos" ("I have considered the days of old"), from the 77th Psalm. It is dignified, and to a reflective mind monitory without being impudently didactic, and I am fond of the Vulgate. The seventeenth-century preachers and essayists were fortunate in being able to quote it, “to saffron with their predicacioun," but it should be kept for sober occasions. Matthew Arnold was something too liberal in his use: it became a mere trick of style with him. joyed the sensations of a British chief driving his springless car to the fortress of his tribe." But, more fortunate than this writer, we did not smash our chariot in effecting an entrance into the camp. The vale lies stretched out below in vast and level panorama, "like the garden of the Lord," and there is no such lovely sight, to my thinking, anywhere. It is a little sad, too, for all the towns one sees are slowly decaying, largely through their own folly in refusing the Great Western Railway. Reading had more foresight, and in the halfcentury has more than trebled its population. Perhaps it is not so sad after all, for Wantage remains what it was to Bishop. Butler if not quite what it was to King Alfred, and Faringdon has still its memories of Saxon kings (not to mention Pye), while Reading is like a strong ass couching down between the two burdens of Sutton's seeds and Palmer's biscuits. After tea we drove on to Uffington village for the sake of Hughes's memory. But the church is a splendid specimen of early English architecture, and well worth a visit for its own sake, as our American cousins are sure to find out soon, and make it a shrine of pilgrimage. The vicar should open a subscription list for some memorial, as they are doing at Rugby. schoolhouse still stands as it did when Tom Brown and Jacob Doodlecalf were caught at the porch by the choleric wheelwright, only the date over the door is not 1671, as you see it in the illustration, but 1617. The inscription just indicated in the picture is as follows: The Nil foedum dictu vitiiq; hæc limina tangat Intra quæ pueri. A.D. 1637. The "pueri" is emphatic, and is explained by one of the rules of the founder on the walls within: "Whereas it is a most common and usual course for many to send their daughters to common schools to be |