; and
while a few tall pintas, Milton or Pen, still sailed a lonely course by
the stars and their own private compass, the cock-boat, Pepys, must go
about with the majority among "the stupid starers and the loud huzzas."

The respectable are not led so much by any desire of applause as by a
positive need for countenance. The weaker and the tamer the man, the
more will he require this support; and any positive quality relieves him,
by just so much, of this dependence. In a dozen ways, Pepys was quite
strong enough to please himself without regard for others; but his
positive qualities were not co-extensive with the field of conduct; and
in many parts of life he followed, with gleeful precision, in the
footprints of the contemporary Mrs. Grundy. In morals, particularly, he
lived by the countenance of others; felt a slight from another more
keenly than a meanness in himself, and then first repented when he was
found out. You could talk of religion or morality to such a man; and by
the artist side of him, by his lively sympathy and apprehension, he could
rise, as it were dramatically, to the significance of what you said. All
that matter in religion which has been nicknamed other-worldliness was
strictly in his gamut; but a rule of life that should make a man rudely
virtuous, following right in good report and ill report, was foolishness
and a stumbling-block to Pepys. He was much thrown across the Friends;
and nothing can be more instructive than his attitude toward these most
interesting people of that age. I have mentioned how he conversed with
one as he rode; when he saw some brought from a meeting under arrest, "I
would to God," said he, "they would either conform, or be more wise and
not be catched;" and to a Quaker in his own office he extended a timid
though effectual protection. Meanwhile there was growing up next door to
him that beautiful nature, William Pen. It is odd that Pepys condemned
him for a top; odd, though natural enough when you see Pen's portrait,
that Pepys was jealous of him with his wife. But the cream of the story
is when Pen publishes his _Sandy Foundation Shaken_, and Pepys has it
read aloud by his wife. "I find it," he says, "so well writ as, I think,
it is too good for him ever to have writ it; and it is a serious sort of
book, and _not fit for everybody to read_." Nothing is more galling to
the merely respectable than to be brought in contact with religious
ardor. Pepys had his ow