in this service.  With this message I parted, and by coach to the office, where I found Mr. Coventry, and told him this.  Methinks, I confess, he did not seem so pleased with it as I expected, or at least could have wished, and asked me whether I had told my Lord that the Duke do not expect his going, which I told him I had.  But now whether he means really that the Duke, as he told me the other day, do think the Fleete too small for him to take or that he would not have him go, I swear I cannot tell.  But methinks other ways might have been used to put him by without going in this manner about it, and so I hope it is out of kindness indeed.  Dined at home, and so to the office, where a great while alone in my office, nobody near, with Bagwell’s wife of Deptford, but the woman seems so modest that I durst not offer any courtship to her, though I had it in my mind when I brought her in to me.  But I am resolved to do her husband a courtesy, for I think he is a man that deserves very well.  So abroad with my wife by coach to St. James’s, to one Lady Poultny’s, where I found my Lord, I doubt, at some vain pleasure or other.  I did give him a short account of what I had done with Mr. Coventry, and so left him, and to my wife again in the coach, and with her to the Parke, but the Queene being gone by the Parke to Kensington, we staid not but straight home and to supper (the first time I have done so this summer), and so to my office doing business, and then to my monthly accounts, where to my great comfort I find myself better than I was still the last month, and now come to L930.  I was told to-day, that upon Sunday night last, being the King’s birth-day, the King was at my Lady Castlemayne’s lodgings (over the hither-gates at Lambert’s lodgings) dancing with fiddlers all night almost; and all the world coming by taking notice of it, which I am sorry to hear.  The discourse of the town is only whether a warr with Holland or no, and we are preparing for it all we can, which is but little.  Myself subject more than ordinary to pain by winde, which makes me very sad, together with the trouble which at present lies upon me in my father’s behalf, rising from the death of my brother, which are many and great.  Would to God they were over!

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     Bath at the top of his house
     Fear all his kindness is but only his lust to her
     Fetch masts from New England
     Find myself to over-value things when a child
     Generally with corruption, but most indeed with neglect
     I slept soundly all the sermon
     In a hackney and full of people, was ashamed to be seen
     In my dining-room she was doing something upon the pott
     Methought very ill, or else I am grown worse to please
     Mrs. Lane was gone forth, and so I missed of my intent
     Saw “The German Princess” acted, by the woman herself
     Slabbering my band sent home for another
     That hair by hair had his horse’s tail pulled off indeed