what I heard last night, which I could not have believed.  Besides overlooking the words which he sung, I find them not at all humoured as they ought to be, and as I believed he had done all he had sett.  Though he himself do indeed sing in a manner as to voice and manner the best I ever heard yet, and a strange mastery he hath in making of extraordinary surprising closes, that are mighty pretty, but his bragging that he do understand tones and sounds as well as any man in the world, and better than Sir W. Davenant or any body else, I do not like by no means, but was sick of it and of him for it.  He gone, Dr. Clerke fell to reading a new play, newly writ, of a friend’s of his; but, by his discourse and confession afterwards, it was his own.  Some things, but very few, moderately good; but infinitely far from the conceit, wit, design, and language of very many plays that I know; so that, but for compliment, I was quite tired with hearing it.  It being done, and commending the play, but against my judgment, only the prologue magnifying the happiness of our former poets when such sorry things did please the world as was then acted, was very good.  So set Mrs. Pierce at home, and away ourselves home, and there to my office, and then my chamber till my eyes were sore at writing and making ready my letter and accounts for the Commissioners of Tangier to-morrow, which being done, to bed, hearing that there was a very great disorder this day at the Ticket Office, to the beating and bruising of the face of Carcasse very much.  A foul evening this was to-night, and I mightily troubled to get a coach home; and, which is now my common practice, going over the ruins in the night, I rid with my sword drawn in the coach.

14th.  Up and to the office, where Carcasse comes with his plaistered face, and called himself Sir W. Batten’s martyr, which made W. Batten mad almost, and mighty quarrelling there was.  We spent the morning almost wholly upon considering some way of keeping the peace at the Ticket Office; but it is plain that the care of that office is nobody’s work, and that is it that makes it stand in the ill condition it do.  At noon home to dinner, and after dinner by coach to my Lord Chancellor’s, and there a meeting:  the Duke of York, Duke of Albemarle, and several other Lords of the Commission of Tangier.  And there I did present a state of my accounts, and managed them well; and my Lord Chancellor did say, though he was, in other things, in an ill humour, that no man in England was of more method, nor made himself better understood than myself.  But going, after the business of money was over, to other businesses, of settling the garrison, he did fling out, and so did the Duke of York, two or three severe words touching my Lord Bellasses:  that he would have no Governor come away from thence in less than three years; no, though his lady were with child.  “And,” says the Duke of York, “there should be no Governor continue so, longer than three years.”  “Nor,”