Page:In the dozy hours, and other papers.djvu/26

 12 him new," and double our enjoyment. His characters seldom have any substantiality. We remember the talk, but not the talkers, and so go blithely back to those scenes of glad good-fellowship, to that admirable conservatism and that caustic wit.

Let us, then, instead of striving so strenuously to remember all we read, be grateful that we can occasionally forget. Mr. Samuel Pepys, who knew how to extract a fair share of pleasure out of life, frankly admits that he delighted in seeing an old play over again, because he was wise enough to commit none of it to memory; and Mr. Lang, who gives his vote to "Pepys's Diary" as the very prince of bedside books, the one "which may send a man happily to sleep with a smile on his lips," declares it owes its fitness for this post to the ease with which it can be forgotten. "Your deeds and misdeeds," he writes, "your dinners and kisses, glide from our recollections, and being read again, surprise and amuse us afresh. Compared with you, Montaigne is dry, Boswell is too full of matter; but one can take you up anywhere, and anywhere lay you down, certain of being diverted by the picture of that