22nd.  To Westminster, and there missed of my Lord, and so about noon I and W. Howe by water to the Wardrobe, where my Lord and all the officers of the Wardrobe dined, and several other friends of my Lord, at a venison pasty.  Before dinner, my Lady Wright and my Lady Jem. sang songs to the harpsicon.  Very pleasant and merry at dinner.  And then I went away by water to the office, and there staid till it was late.  At night before I went to bed the barber came to trim me and wash me, and so to bed, in order to my being clean to-morrow.

23rd.  This day I went to my Lord, and about many other things at Whitehall, and there made even my accounts with Mr. Shepley at my Lord’s, and then with him and Mr. Moore and John Bowles to the Rhenish wine house, and there came Jonas Moore, the mathematician, to us, and there he did by discourse make us fully believe that England and France were once the same continent, by very good arguments, and spoke very many things, not so much to prove the Scripture false as that the time therein is not well computed nor understood.  From thence home by water, and there shifted myself into my black silk suit (the first day I have put it on this year), and so to my Lord Mayor’s by coach, with a great deal of honourable company, and great entertainment.  At table I had very good discourse with Mr. Ashmole, wherein he did assure me that frogs and many insects do often fall from the sky, ready formed.  Dr. Bates’s singularity in not rising up nor drinking the King’s nor other healths at the table was very much observed.

[Dr. William Bates, one of the most eminent of the Puritan divines, and who took part in the Savoy Conference.  His collected writings were published in 1700, and fill a large folio volume.  The Dissenters called him silver-tongued Bates.  Calamy affirmed that if Bates would have conformed to the Established Church he might have been raised to any bishopric in the kingdom.  He died in 1699, aged seventy-four.]

From thence we all took coach, and to our office, and there sat till it was late; and so I home and to bed by day-light.  This day was kept a holy-day through the town; and it pleased me to see the little boys walk up and down in procession with their broom-staffs in their hands, as I had myself long ago gone.

[Pepys here refers to the perambulation of parishes on Holy Thursday, still observed.  This ceremony was sometimes enlivened by whipping the boys, for the better impressing on their minds the remembrance of the day, and the boundaries of the parish, instead of beating houses or stones.  But this would not have harmonized well with the excellent Hooker’s practice on this day, when he “always dropped some loving and facetious observations, to be remembered against the next year, especially by the boys and young people.”  Amongst Dorsetshire customs, it seems that, in perambulating a manor or parish, a boy is tossed