The advantage of writing Memoirs is that nobody can supersede you. A man who has learnt to write and is wise enough to write about his own time has the promise of immortality in his pocket. The editors of Herodotus and Froissart and Saint-Simon come and go; and the heirs of their learning sit in their seats, take over the inheritance, and perform the first duty of heirs by burying their fathers. The new owners soon add to the estate and honors of their line; and before very long the first of the editorial ancestry is become nothing more than a name mentioned in a preface. It is a law from which greater men than editors, the very historians themselves, are not exempt. Unless he be Livy or Gibbon, the historian who writes of any age except his own has but a brief and transient tenure of fame or life. But there is no death for Thucydides or Clarendon; and there is none for. Saint-Simon or for Evelyn. They are for ever the men who saw with their own eyes the things and people they describe, and, though they may have to call in industry to edit them and learning to correct them, they can safely defy genius itself to take their place.

Still, of course, though they may all alike be indestructible, they are not all of the same metal. There is the lead of Sully, with its occasional vein of gold: there is the iron of Saint-Simon. apt for the furnace; and there is the cool and gracious silver of Evelyn.

1 "The Diary of John Evelyn." With an introduction and notes, by Austin Dobson. Three vols. London: Macmillan, 1906.

2 "The Diary of John Evelyn; with a selecEdited tion from his familiar Letters, etc." from the original MSS. by William Bray, F.S.A. A new edition in four volumes, with a life of the author and a new preface. By Henry B. Wheatley. London: Bickers, 1906.

The contrast, at any rate, between the Englishman, who writes so much of Whitehall, and his younger French contemporary, who writes almost always of Versailles, is striking enough. Evelyn's little finger knew more of books and science and the arts than the whole body and mind of Saint-Simon. But Saint-Simon is a far more powerful writer, as he is also a more masterful and passionate personality. Evelyn is a virtuous lover of all good men, and a virtuous disapprover of all bad men. Saint-Simon loves and hates with equal fierceness, and by no means only on grounds of reason. An honest and virtuous man himself, he is naturally, as a rule, on the side of the angels-on that of the Duc de Bourgogne, for instance. But then there is also the Regent to be remembered, who was not exactly one of the angels. And, on the other side of the account, there are the people he did not like and could not be just to, such as Madame de Maintenon and the Duc de Maine. That is to say, that his likes and dislikes were very largely an affair of temperament, and even of prejudice, as they are with most people of strong character.

His Memoirs suffered less from this than might have been expected; for there was something stronger in him than his prejudices, and that was the thing which provided the whole business and pleasure of his life, the desire by one means or another to know everything that was being said or done in that Court which was his world, and to record it instantly, effectively, and accurately. The impression is immediate; the pen that writes is hot with the eager quest of truth, and hot with the stir and pleasure of its discovery almost as much as with the fire of in

The truth he gives us is not always what the studies and reflections of another century will declare it to have been; but it is that unique kind of truth, the impression of the moment, which no subsequent wisdom of the ages can either recapture or supersede. And in Saint-Simon it has a vividness. a flutter of actuality, which is unsurpassed in all literature.

Of this particular and most delightful quality few writers of Memoirs have so little as Evelyn. The note of the man is sweet reasonableness; and that makes always for coolness of temper, and not unfrequently for grayness of color. Even where his Diary has not been retouched by its author's ripe wisdom or the experience of later years, as we know much of it was, the man is so naturally wise and good that he is as sensible in the thick of a revolution as the sagest posterity can be in its easy chair after the lapse of two hundred years. He is a saint, but he does not really hate sinners; a sage who only weeps over the foolishness of fools. A far more cultivated and a far more public-spirited man than Saint-Simon, he is thinking too much of greater matters to be able to throw himself with Saint-Simon's ardor into the eternal intrigue of personalities that makes up the life of a Court. In deed, he is altogether more interested in things, and less in persons, than Saint-Simon. All the petty side of personality which makes the fascination of Saint-Simon and Pepys, as it does of Miss Austen, he, as a rule, simply passes by. He is neither so absorbed in himself as Pepys, nor so absorbed in a few people about him as SaintSimon. Pepys' childishness, his absurd egotism, his unique genius for the confessional, his frank admissions that the things disdained by saints and philosophers are for him things of daily pleasure, interest, and importance

the Frenchman's heat and violence or his unique air of taking us into the yery heart of the furnace that keeps the world in motion. Evelyn is, in fact, a wiser and better man, and a poorer writer, than either.

What, then, is it that keeps his book and name alive? Well, of course, he has one great merit which belongs of right and of necessity to all keepers of voluminous diaries. No man can keep a diary for long who does not find life interesting. The pessimistic diarists are only so in appearance; when you come close to them you find that they enjoy their pessimism more than the average man enjoys life. And in any case they are the exception. Most of these recorders of every day take the intensest pleasure either in themselves and their doings or in the spectacle of the world, or in both at once. The daily pages could not be kept up without the stimulus of the daily pleasure. To the diarist, things, that is, his things, whatever they are, are so intensely interesting that the thought of their perishing unrecorded is intolerable. And so Pepys must tell us his exact feelings when people would not admire his new clothes; and Saint-Simon must give us every twitch of the Duc du Maine's features in the day of his downfall; and Boswell finds Johnson's retorts far too delightful a dish to set before oblivion even when he is himself their victim. With men of his sort nothing can stand against the pleasure of telling the tale, neither vanity, nor prudence, nor even decency.

Evelyn's way is a different way from those others, but it is still, like them, the way of pleasure. He is decently pleased with himself throughout, and he is throughout delighted with the arts and sciences of wise men and with the works of God. Neither bad times nor bad men can long silence his praises of fine buildings and beautiful

gardens and new discoveries.

Except the two greatest of all, he knew all the interesting Englishmen of his day; and not the Queen of Sheba herself took greater pleasure in listening to wisdom. No sort comes amiss to him. He is always ready for divinity and a great hearer of the best sermons; but he is equally ready to discuss shipping with Pepys or architecture with Wren or antiquities with Arundel or science with Boyle. England has seldom, perhaps never, produced a better type of the man of cultivation, intelligence, and public spirit. There is his world. The weaker side of human nature may sometimes regret that he will not tell us a little more of the actual life of Whitehall, the gossip of the Court, and the daily sayings and doings of that attractive, disappointing, too sadly human monarch, King Charles II. But that is not his affair. Except for one terrible picture, that famous one of the Sunday before Charles' death, he gives few of the details which are so overflowingly abundant in Saint-Simon that we feel as if we had lived at Versailles. As for the most remembered personal element in the Court, he says little about it. As a patriot he is disgusted at the cabal of "parasites, pimps, and .concubines" who supplanted Clarendon; as a Christian he laments the King's vices; as a gentleman he stands amazed at their unshamed publicity; but as a loyal subject he says as little as he can about them. The notion that courtesans are the most interesting of human beings had not been invented in his day, and, if it had, it would not have been entertained at Sayes Court or Wotton. With such creatures and their world he has as little to do as he may, His curiosity, insatiable as it is, is of the old sort, not the new; the things which it is so unwearied in searching out are the things which adorn human nature and not-well, not the other things. He is an amateur, again in the

old sense, of the best things everywhere, and of all things at their best; and for him vice would simply be either a coming short of the proper stature of humanity, or a corruption of it and a disease; in either case a thing to be done with as quickly as possible.

There are, in fact, two casts of mind and two classes of writers which stand out in more or less marked contrast to each other at all times, and there is no doubt to which Evelyn belongs. However we name them, "ceux qui agitent le monde, et ceux qui le civilisent," classical and romantic, the men of clearness and calm and the men of magic and enthusiasm, the walkers in the broad streets of life where the fine palaces and fair prospects are, and the walkers in the by-streets where squalor and eccentricity hug their independence, it is plain enough in which party Evelyn is to be looked for, if so humble a person as a diarist may find a place in either. The one sort finds everything interesting, even the ugly, and sometimes especially the ugly; the other averts its eyes, as far as it may, from disease and disorder, and ugliness and irrationality. That is what Goethe meant when, with some injustice to himself as well as to other people, he declared that the classical was the healthy and the romantic the diseased. Anyhow, without any calling of names, the distinction is plain, and so is Evelyn's character and plan. While his friend Pepys is as fond of his own feelings as a modern romantic. and as full of the curiosity of ugliness as a modern realist, Evelyn is as choice in his tastes and as dignified in his confessions as the most irreproachable of the French classics.

This, then, is the man whom we now have introduced to us afresh by Mr. Wheatley and Mr. Austin Dobson. Mr. Wheatley's edition is a reprint of that already issued under his editorship in 1879, the text of which was itself a

reprint of that of 1827. The present publication also contains Mr. Wheatley's life of Evelyn, written for the 1879 edition, the bibliography compiled for that work, and "an entirely fresh series of engravings." These, however, are much less numerous, and less well printed than those in the other new edition, for which Mr. Austin Dobson is responsible. This latter must be regarded as the best existing edition of the Diary until some future editor has access to the original MS. at Wotton. That the owner at present refuses; and without it no edition can be either final or complete. Meanwhile, till the portions of the journal omitted by the original editors are given to the public, the best attainable text is not that of 1827, followed by Mr. Wheatley, but that issued in 1850-1852 by John Forster, added to Bohn's Library in 1857, and now reprinted by Mr. Dobson. This text contained a good many passages omitted by Bray, the first editor. It was founded on the labors of William Upcott, who had been the original cause of the Diary being published, and had assisted Bray in preparing the first edition in 1818, reprinted in 1827. But from some acciIdent these editions did not include a number of passages Upcott had intended to be printed; and that of 1827 even omitted a few passages which occur in the editions of 1818 and 1819. The edition of 1850 is, in substance, Upcott's revision of the original text, with the addition of those portions of his intended text which had been omitted by Bray. These omitted passages are not of very great importance, so far as we have observed; one instance may suffice to illustrate their character. The full entry for the 12th of May, 1641, is as follows:

On the 12th of May, 1 beheld on Tower Hill the fatal stroke which severed the wisest head in England from the shoulders of the Earl of Strafford,

whose crime coming under the cognizance of no human law or statute, a new one was made, not to be a precedent, but his destruction-(with what reluctancy the King signed the execution, he has sufficiently expressed; to which he imputes his own unjust suffering) to such exorbitancy were things arrived.

The words in brackets do not appear in the earlier editions, and consequently not in that of Mr. Wheatley. So for the year 1638, while Mr. Dobson gives us a whole page of entries, Mr. Wheatley gives only three lines; and in the next year the account Evelyn gives of his confirmation by the Bishop of Oxford will not be found in Mr. Wheatley's edition. There is therefore no question as to which book is the more complete.

Mr. Dobson also gives us an agreeable introduction, though, as he evidently fears, his readers may miss something of that unique and perfect intimacy with his subject which he has accustomed them to expect from him. But, of course, Evelyn was born a hundred years too early to belong to the world Mr. Dobson has made so peculiarly his own. Still he has a mass of me useful information to give us in his new notes; and it is strange that one of the very few actual errors we have found in them refers to an event that took place in the period about which he is generally omniscient. In September 1644 Evelyn left Moulins on the Allier and "took horse for Varennes, an obscure village." On which Mr. Dobson gives a note which does less credit than usual to his editorial watchfulness. "The obscure village to which Evelyn refers was destined to have a more memorable association in later years with the French Royal Family." Neither the historical nor the geographical sense can have been quite awake when this was written or repeated. The fatal flight was of course to the