about 300 bills; whereas in the late King’s time it was much to have 40.  With my money home by coach, it, being the first time that I could get home before our gates were shut since I came to the Navy office.  When I came home I found my wife not very well of her old pain . . . . which she had when we were married first.  I went and cast up the expense that I laid out upon my former house (because there are so many that are desirous of it, and I am, in my mind, loth to let it go out of my hands, for fear of a turn).  I find my layings-out to come to about L20, which with my fine will come to about L22 to him that shall hire my house of me.—­[Pepys wished to let his house in Axe Yard now that he had apartments at the Navy Office.]—­To bed.

3rd.  Up betimes this morning, and after the barber had done with me, then to the office, where I and Sir William Pen only did meet and despatch business.  At noon my wife and I by coach to Dr. Clerke’s to dinner:  I was very much taken with his lady, a comely, proper woman, though not handsome; but a woman of the best language I ever heard.  Here dined Mrs. Pierce and her husband.  After dinner I took leave to go to Westminster, where I was at the Privy Seal Office all day, signing things and taking money, so that I could not do as I had intended, that is to return to them and go to the Red Bull Playhouse,

[This well-known theatre was situated in St. John’s Street on the site of Red Bull Yard.  Pepys went there on March 23rd, 1661, when he expressed a very poor opinion of the place.  T. Carew, in some commendatory lines on Sir William.  Davenant’s play, “The just Italian,” 1630, abuses both audiences and actors:—­

              “There are the men in crowded heaps that throng
               To that adulterate stage, where not a tongue
               Of th’ untun’d kennel can a line repeat
               Of serious sense.”

There is a token of this house (see “Boyne’s Trade Tokens,” ed. 
Williamson, vol. i., 1889, p. 725).]

but I took coach and went to see whether it was done so or no, and I found it done.  So I returned to Dr. Clerke’s, where I found them and my wife, and by and by took leave and went away home.

4th.  To White Hall, where I found my Lord gone with the King by water to dine at the Tower with Sir J. Robinson,’ Lieutenant.  I found my Lady Jemimah—­[Lady Jemima Montage, daughter of Lord Sandwich, previously described as Mrs. Jem.]—­at my Lord’s, with whom I staid and dined, all alone; after dinner to the Privy Seal Office, where I did business.  So to a Committee of Parliament (Sir Hen[eage] Finch, Chairman), to give them an answer to an order of theirs, “that we could not give them any account of the Accounts of the Navy in the years 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, as they desire.”  After that I went and bespoke some linen of Betty Lane in the Hall, and after that to the Trumpet, where I sat and talked with her, &c.  At night, it being very rainy, and it thundering and lightning exceedingly, I took coach at the Trumpet door, taking Monsieur L’Impertinent along with me as far as the Savoy, where he said he went to lie with Cary Dillon,