y hand; and, therefore, whatever comes of it, I must forbear:
and, therefore, resolve, from this time forward, to have it kept by my
people in long-hand, and must therefore be contented to set down no
more than is fit for them and all the world to know; or, if there be any
thing, which cannot be much, now my amours to Deb. are past, and my eyes
hindering me in almost all other pleasures, I must endeavour to keep
a margin in my book open, to add, here and there, a note in short-hand
with my own hand.

And so I betake myself to that course, which is almost as much as to see
myself go into my grave: for which, and all the discomforts that will
accompany my being blind, the good God prepare me!

May 31, 1669.

END OF THE DIARY.

PREFACE

[This moved, by the editor, to the end
where it seems to fit more comfortably.]

First issue of this edition June, 1896. Reprinted 1897.

In the present volume the Diary is completed, and we here take leave
of a writer who has done so much to interest and enlighten successive
generations of English readers, and who is now for the first time
presented to the world as he really drew his own portrait day by day.

No one who has followed the daily notes of Samuel Pepys from January,
1660, to May, 1669, but must feel sincere regret at their abrupt
conclusion, more particularly as the writer lays down his pen while in
an unhappy temper.

It is evident from the tone of his later utterances that Pepys thought
that he was going blind, a belief which was happily falsified. The
holiday tour in which Charles II. and James, Duke of York, took so much
interest appears to have had its desired effect in restoring the Diarist
to health.

The rest of his eventful life must be sought in the history of the
English Navy which he helped to form, and in his numerous letters,
which on some future occasion the present editor hopes to annotate. The
details to be obtained from these sources form, however, but a sorry
substitute for the words written in the solitude of his office by Pepys
for his own eye alone, and we cannot but feel how great is the world's
loss in that he never resumed the writing of his journal. All must
agree with Coleridge when he wrote on the margin of a copy of the Diary:
"Truly may it be said that this was a greater and more grievous loss to
the mind's eye of posterity than to the bodily organs of Pepys himself.
It makes me restless and disconte