He may have been--indeed, he assuredly was--a coward, but
the coward who has sense of duty enough to overcome his cowardice
is the most truly brave of mankind.
But the one amazing thing which will never be explained about Pepys
is what on earth induced him to go to the incredible labour of
writing down in shorthand cipher not only all the trivialities of
his life, but even his own very gross delinquencies which any other
man would have been only too glad to forget. The Diary was kept for
about ten years, and was abandoned because the strain upon his eyes
of the crabbed shorthand was helping to destroy his sight. I suppose
that he became so familiar with it that he wrote it and read it as
easily as he did ordinary script. But even so, it was a huge labour
to compile these books of strange manuscript. Was it an effort to
leave some memorial of his own existence to single him out from all
the countless sons of men? In such a case he would assuredly have
left directions in somebody's care with a reference to it in the
deed by which he bequeathed his library to Cambridge. In that way
he could have ensured having his Diary read at any date he chose to
name after his death. But no allusion to it was left, and if it had
not been for the ingenuity and perseverance of a single scholar
the dusty volumes would still lie unread in some top shelf of the
Pepysian Library. Publicity, then, was not his object. What could it
have been? The only alternative is reference and self-information.
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