[The company drove round and round the Ring in Hyde Park.  The following two extracts illustrate this, and the, second one shows how the circuit was called the Tour:  “Here (1697) the people of fashion take the diversion of the Ring.  In a pretty high place, which lies very open, they have surrounded a circumference of two or three hundred paces diameter with a sorry kind of balustrade, or rather with postes placed upon stakes but three feet from the ground; and the coaches drive round this.  When they have turned for some time round one way they face about and turn t’other:  so rowls the world!”—­Wilson’s Memoirs, 1719, p. 126.]

["It is in this Park where the Grand Tour or Ring is kept for the Ladies to take the air in their coaches, and in fine weather I have seen above three hundred at a time.”—­[Macky’s] Journey through England, 1724, vol. i., p. 75.]

Here about an hour, and so leaving all by the way we home and found the house as clean as if nothing had been done there to-day from top to bottom, which made us give the cook 12d. a piece, each of us.  So to my office about writing letters by the post, one to my brother John at Brampton telling him (hoping to work a good effect by it upon my mother) how melancholy my father is, and bidding him use all means to get my mother to live peaceably and quietly, which I am sure she neither do nor I fear can ever do, but frightening her with his coming down no more, and the danger of her condition if he should die I trust may do good.  So home and to bed.

5th (Lord’s day).  Up and spent the morning, till the Barber came, in reading in my chamber part of Osborne’s Advice to his Son (which I shall not never enough admire for sense and language), and being by and by trimmed, to Church, myself, wife, Ashwell, &c.  Home to dinner, it raining, while that was prepared to my office to read over my vows with great affection and to very good purpose.  So to dinner, and very well pleased with it.  Then to church again, where a simple bawling young Scot preached.  So home to my office alone till dark, reading some papers of my old navy precedents, and so home to supper, and, after some pleasant talk, my wife, Ashwell, and I to bed.

6th.  Up very betimes and to my office, and there made an end of reading my book that I have of Mr. Barlow’s of the Journal of the Commissioners of the Navy, who begun to act in the year 1628 and continued six years, wherein is fine observations and precedents out of which I do purpose to make a good collection.  By and by, much against my will, being twice sent for, to Sir G. Carteret’s to pass his accounts there, upon which Sir J. Minnes, Sir W. Batten, Sir W. Pen, and myself all the morning, and again after dinner to it, being vexed at my heart to see a thing of that importance done so slightly and with that neglect for which God pardon us, and I would I could mend it.  Thence leaving them I made an excuse and away home, and took my wife by