You will find it
the hardest job you have ever tackled. No matter what secrecy you adopt you
will discover that you cannot tell yourself the _whole truth_ about
yourself. Pepys did that. Benvenuto Cellini pretended to do that, but I
refuse to believe the fellow. Benjamin Franklin tried to do it and very
nearly succeeded. St. Augustine was frank enough about his early
wickedness, but it was the overcharged frankness of the subsequent saint.
No, Pepys is the man. He did the thing better than it has ever been done in
this world.
I like to have the _Paston Letters_ at my bedside, too. Then I go off to
sleep again in the fifteenth century with the voice of old Agnes Paston
sounding in my ears. Dead half a thousand years, yet across the gulf of
time I hear the painful scratching of her quill as she sends "Goddis
blyssyng" to her son in London, and tells him all her motherly gossip and
makes the rough life of far-off Tudor England live for ever. Dear old
Agnes! She little thought as she struggled with her spelling and her pen
that she was writing something that was immortal.
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