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 underwater, 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.
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