In speaking of the difficulties inherent in autobiographical writing, I lay stress, it will be observed, on the set purpose, the deliberate intention, generally characterizing it. No small part of the secret of Pepys’s success as a diarist is to be found in the simple fact that with him the set purpose, the deliberate intention, and the resultant disturbing self-consciousness are almost entirely absent. Pepys did not write for the public eye, or for any glance save his own; he recorded his impressions and enterprises, his pleasures, anxieties, ambitions, aims, and passing fancies because he found satisfaction in thus summing up “the actions of the day each night before he slept”; and not at all because he proposed to draw a full-length portrait of himself for the benefit of his contemporaries or the amusement of posterity. It has been suggested by one of the wiseacres who can never leave a simple fact alone, that Pepys regarded his Diary as material towards a fully developed autobiography. Possibly so. But we may be certain that had such autobiography ever been written, the self-delineation of its pages would have differed in many important particulars—in details put in, and even more seriously in details left out—from that contained in the journal itself. As it is, we have an odd and uncomfortable sense, when we first open the Diary, of intruding where we have no proper business, of breaking in upon the privacy of a man’s life, and surprising him in the undress which he might wear for himself, but in which he would not willingly be caught by even his closest friend. For remember that the six small volumes which contain the manuscript diary are filled with densely packed short-hand, peppered with occasional words and phrases from the French, Spanish, Latin, and Greek; and that it was only after immense labor that the script was transliterated, and the secrets which poor Pepys had, as he fondly supposed, buried there forever, given to an impertinent and unsympathetic world.[3] Writing thus for himself, and for himself alone, and guarding himself by every means within his power against the possibility of exposure, our chronicler was enabled to make his narrative the luminous, because free and spontaneous, expression of his innermost life. A man may be honest with himself in cipher for whom long-hand, to say nothing of the thought of subsequent publication, would bring the inevitable and fatal temptations to sophistication. Could Pepys have foreseen the ultimate fate of his journal, it is safe to say that it would never have been written, or, once written, would have been discreetly burned. Poor fellow! His sense of complete security, of inviolable self-concealment, made possible such confidences as otherwise would never have been committed to paper.