the reasons for liking Pepys, it would be found that they were as numerous as the days upon which he made an entry in his Diary, and surely that was sufficient argument in his favour.  There was no book, Mr. Lowell said, that he knew of, or that occurred to his memory, with which Pepys’s Diary could fairly be compared, except the journal of L’Estoile, who had the same anxious curiosity and the same commonness, not to say vulgarity of interest, and the book was certainly unique in one respect, and that was the absolute sincerity of the author with himself.  Montaigne is conscious that we are looking over his shoulder, and Rousseau secretive in comparison with him.  The very fact of that sincerity of the author with himself argued a certain greatness of character.  Dr. Hickes, who attended Pepys at his deathbed, spoke of him as ‘this great man,’ and said he knew no one who died so greatly.  And yet there was something almost of the ridiculous in the statement when the ‘greatness’ was compared with the garrulous frankness which Pepys showed towards himself.  There was no parallel to the character of Pepys, he believed, in respect of ‘naivete’, unless it were found in that of Falstaff, and Pepys showed himself, too, like Falstaff, on terms of unbuttoned familiarity with himself.  Falstaff had just the same ‘naivete’, but in Falstaff it was the ‘naivete’ of conscious humour.  In Pepys it was quite different, for Pepys’s ‘naivete’ was the inoffensive vanity of a man who loved to see himself in the glass.  Falstaff had a sense, too, of inadvertent humour, but it was questionable whether Pepys could have had any sense of humour at all, and yet permitted himself to be so delightful.  There was probably, however, more involuntary humour in Pepys’s Diary than there was in any other book extant.  When he told his readers of the landing of Charles II. at Dover, for instance, it would be remembered how Pepys chronicled the fact that the Mayor of Dover presented the Prince with a Bible, for which he returned his thanks and said it was the ’most precious Book to him in the world.’  Then, again, it would be remembered how, when he received a letter addressed ‘Samuel Pepys, Esq.,’ he confesses in the Diary that this pleased him mightily.  When, too, he kicked his cookmaid, he admits that he was not sorry for it, but was sorry that the footboy of a worthy knight with whom he was acquainted saw him do it.  And the last instance he would mention of poor Pepys’s ‘naivete’ was when he said in the Diary that he could not help having a certain pleasant and satisfied feeling when Barlow died.  Barlow, it must be remembered, received during his life the yearly sum from Pepys of L100.  The value of Pepys’s book was simply priceless, and while there was nothing in it approaching that single page in St. Simon where he described that thunder of courtierly red heels passing from one wing of the Palace to another as the Prince was lying on his death-bed, and favour was to flow from another source, still