Musick and women I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is.

Samuel Pepys (1633–1703), a naval administrator and avid diarist, repeatedly records in his Diary his susceptibility to two pleasures that competed with his work and moral self-discipline: music (which he studied seriously and pursued socially) and women (from flirtations to extramarital affairs). The line reflects Pepys’s characteristic candor and self-scrutiny, written in the midst of his busy professional life in Restoration London, where he often moved between official duties and the city’s entertainments. In the Diary he frequently notes resolutions to be more industrious or restrained, only to confess how readily he is diverted by concerts, singing, and female company.

The sentence is a compact confession of weakness framed almost humorously: no matter how pressing his “business,” Pepys admits he yields to the twin temptations of aesthetic pleasure and erotic attraction. “Cannot but give way” suggests compulsion rather than choice, revealing the tension that animates much of the Diary—between ambition, Protestant-tinged self-accounting, and the vivid pull of Restoration sociability. The misspelling “Musick” also evokes the period’s orthography and Pepys’s immediacy as a diarist. As a self-portrait, the line captures Pepys’s modern-seeming honesty about desire and distraction, and his awareness that delight can override duty.