[Dr. Johnson was puzzled by the following passage in “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” act v., sc. 3:  “Divide me like a bribe-buck, each a haunch.  I will keep the sides to myself; my shoulders for the fellow of this walk.”  If he could have read the account of Sir William Hickes’s dinner, he would at once have understood the allusion to the keeper’s perquisites of the shoulders of all deer killed in his walk.—­B.]

which he takes away from the keeper of the Forest, and a few pigeons, and all in the meanest manner) that ever I did see, to the basest degree.  After dinner we officers of the Navy stepped aside to read some letters and consider some business, and so in again.  I was only pleased at a very fine picture of the Queene-Mother, when she was young, by Van-Dike; a very good picture, and a lovely sweet face.  Thence in the afternoon home, and landing at Greenwich I saw Mr. Pen walking my way, so we walked together, and for discourse I put him into talk of France, when he took delight to tell me of his observations, some good, some impertinent, and all ill told, but it served for want of better, and so to my house, where I find my wife abroad, and hath been all this day, nobody knows where, which troubled me, it being late and a cold evening.  So being invited to his mother’s to supper, we took Mrs. Barbara, who was mighty finely dressed, and in my Lady’s coach, which we met going for my wife, we thither, and there after some discourse went to supper.  By and by comes my wife and Mercer, and had been with Captain Cocke all day, he coming and taking her out to go see his boy at school at Brumly [Bromley], and brought her home again with great respect.  Here pretty merry, only I had no stomach, having dined late, to eat.  After supper Mr. Pen and I fell to discourse about some words in a French song my wife was saying, “D’un air tout interdict,” wherein I laid twenty to one against him which he would not agree with me, though I know myself in the right as to the sense of the word, and almost angry we were, and were an houre and more upon the dispute, till at last broke up not satisfied, and so home in their coach and so to bed.  H. Russell did this day deliver my 20s. to my wife’s father or mother, but has not yet told us how they do.

14th.  Up, and walked to Greenwich, and there fitted myself in several businesses to go to London, where I have not been now a pretty while.  But before I went from the office newes is brought by word of mouth that letters are now just now brought from the fleete of our taking a great many more of the Dutch fleete, in which I did never more plainly see my command of my temper in my not admitting myself to receive any kind of joy from it till I had heard the certainty of it, and therefore went by water directly to the Duke of Albemarle, where I find a letter of the Lath from Solebay, from my Lord Sandwich, of the fleete’s meeting with about eighteen more of the Dutch fleete, and his taking of most of them; and