the house," Bright has told us, "standing by me, and leaning on the
coffin, was his sorrowing daughter, one whose attachment to her father
seems to have been a passion scarcely equalled among daughters. She
said, 'My father used to like me very much to read to him the Sermon on
the Mount. His own life was, to a large, extent, a sermon based upon
that best, that greatest of all sermons. His was a life of perpetual
self-sacrifice.'"

* * * * *

SAMUEL PEPYS

Diary

Samuel Pepys, author of the incomparable "Diary," was born
either in London or at Brampton, Huntingdonshire, on February
23, 1632-3, son of John Pepys, a London tailor. By the
influence of the Earl of Sandwich, he was entered in the
public service. Beginning as a clerk in the Exchequer, he was
soon transferred to the Naval Department, and rose to the high
office of secretary to the Admiralty. His services were
interrupted for a time, on the baseless suspicion that he was
a Catholic, during the panic about the supposed "Popish Plot,"
but he was returned to his charge, and held it until the
accession of William and Mary. Pepys was a man of very wide
interests. He was a member of parliament, and became president
of the Royal Society. He was an accomplished musician and a
keen critic of painting, architecture, and the drama. But it
is as a connoisseur of human nature that Pepys is known
to-day. The "Diary" extended over the ten years, January,
1659-60, to May, 1669; it closed when he was thirty-seven
years old, and he lived thirty-four years afterwards. The
manuscript, written in shorthand, fills six volumes, which
repose at Magdalene College, Cambridge. It was deciphered in
1825, when it was published as "Memoirs of Samuel Pepys,
comprising his Diary from 1659 to 1669, deciphered by the Rev.
J. Smith, and a Selection of his Private Correspondence,
edited by Lord Braybrooke." Pepys died on May 26, 1703.

_I.--"God Bless King Charles"_

_January_ 1, 1659-60. Blessed be God, at the end of last year I was in
very good health, without any sense of my old pain, but upon taking of
cold. I lived in Axe Yard, having my wife and servant, Jane, and no
other in family than us three.

The condition of the state was thus: the Rump, after being disturbed by
my Lord Lambert, was lately returned to sit again. Th