night it starts; afterwards St. Paul's with its roofs fallen.
He is on the fleet that brings Charles home from his long travels, and
afterwards when Charles is crowned, he records the processions and the
crowds. But also Pepys quarrels with his wife and writes it out on paper.
He debauches a servant and makes a note of it. He describes a supper at an
ale-house, and how he plays on the flute. He sings "Beauty Retire," a song
of his own making, and tells how his listeners "cried it up."

In consequence of this, Samuel Pepys is now known chiefly for his
attentions to the pretty actresses of Drury Lane, for kissing Nell Gwynne
in her tiring-room, for his suppers with "the jade" Mrs. Knipp, for his
love of a tune upon the fiddle, for coming home from Vauxhall by wherry
late at night, "singing merrily" down the river. Or perhaps we recall him
best for burying his wine and Parmazan cheese in his garden at the time
of the Fire, or for standing to the measure of Mr. Pin the tailor for a
"camlett cloak with gold buttons," or for sitting for his portrait in an
Indian gown which he "hired to be drawn in." Who shall say that this is not
the very portrait by which we have fancied him stalking off to Commons?
Could the apprentices have known in what a borrowed majesty he walked,
would they not have tossed their caps in mirth and pointed their dusky
fingers at him?

Or we remember that he once lived in a garret, and that his wife, "poor
wretch," was used to make the fire while Samuel lay abed, and that she
washed his "foul clothes"--that by degrees he came to be wealthy and
rode in his own yellow coach--that his wife went abroad in society "in
a flowered tabby gown"--that Pepys forsook his habits of poverty and
exchanged his twelve-penny seat in the theatre gallery for a place in the
pit--and that on a rare occasion (doubtless when he was alone and there was
but one seat to buy) he arose to the extravagance of a four-shilling box.

Consequently, despite the weightier parts of the diary, we know Pepys
chiefly in his hours of ease. Sittings and consultations are so dry. If
only the world would run itself decently and in silence! Even a meeting of
the Committee for Tangier--when the Prince of Wales was present and such
smaller fry as Chancellors--is dull and is matter for a skipping eye.

If a session of Parliament bulks to a fat paragraph and it happens that
there is a bit of deviltry just below at the bottom of the page--maybe no
more