« Why he kept it we can only guess : he never tells us. No doubt his motives were mixed. He may have been inspired to start it by the political excitement of the late months of 1659 when it was plain to all that the Commonwealth was collapsing ; certainly the subject of restoration bulks large in the early entries. He may have been influenced, too, by the Puritan writers and preachers of his youth, who taught the value of a journal as a means of moral discipline. His diary bears traces of that influence in the monthly and annual reckonings in which he summarized the state of his affairs. But the strongest likelihood is that he wrote from a need to organize and discipline himself that was temperamental rather than religious in origin. He was by nature obsessively and compulsively systematic. The neatness of his handwriting is significant. So is his concern for arranging his books by size, and for the regular balancing of his accounts. Yet, with all the passion for order, he was spontaneous and enthusiastic. The diary was perhaps the means of reconciling these opposing qualities. He loved life because it was so varied ; at the same time, he was worried by disorder. By sieving the undity events through his memory and marshalling them in a diary’s straight and neatly written lines he could impose on them some semblance of control. »