rprise at
our prolonged existence; events make an impression out of all proportion
to their consequence; we are unspeakably touched by our own past
adventures, and look forward to our future personality with sentimental
interest. It was something of this, I think, that clung to Pepys.
Although not sentimental in the abstract, he was sweetly sentimental
about himself. His own past clung about his heart, an evergreen. He was
the slave of an association. He could not pass by Islington, where his
father used to carry him to cakes and ale, but he must light at the
"King's Head" and eat and drink "for remembrance of the old house sake."
He counted it good fortune to lie a night at Epsom to renew his old
walks, "where Mrs. Hely and I did use to walk and talk, with whom I had
the first sentiments of love and pleasure in a woman's company, discourse
and taking her by the hand, she being a pretty woman." He goes about
weighing up the _Assurance_, which lay near Woolwich under water, and
cries in a parenthesis, "Poor ship, that I have been twice merry in, in
Captain Holland's time;" and after revisiting the _Naseby_, now changed
into the _Charles_, he confesses "it was a great pleasure to myself to
see the ship that I began my good fortune in." The stone that he was cut
for he preserved in a case; and to the Turners he kept alive such
gratitude for their assistance that for years, and after he had begun to
mount himself into higher zones, he continued to have that family to
dinner on the anniversary of the operation. Not Hazlitt nor Rousseau had
a more romantic passion for their past, although at times they might
express it more romantically; and if Pepys shared with them this childish
fondness, did not Rousseau, who left behind him the _Confessions_, or
Hazlitt, who wrote the _Liber Amoris_, and loaded his essays with loving
personal detail, share with Pepys in his unwearied egotism? For the two
things go hand in hand; or, to be more exact, it is the first that makes
the second either possible or pleasing.

But, to be quite in sympathy with Pepys, we must return once more to the
experience of children. I can remember to have written, in the fly-leaf
of more than one book, the date and the place where I then was--if, for
instance, I was ill in bed or sitting in a certain garden; these were
jottings for my future self; if I should chance on such a note in after
years, I thought it would cause me a particular thrill to recog