some things there, with Mr. Moore and Dean Fuller to the Leg in King Street, and, sending for my wife, we dined there very merry, and after dinner, parted.  After dinner with my wife to Mrs. Blackburne to visit her.  She being within I left my wife there, and I to the Privy Seal, where I despatch some business, and from thence to Mrs. Blackburne again, who did treat my wife and me with a great deal of civility, and did give us a fine collation of collar of beef, &c.  Thence I, having my head full of drink from having drunk so much Rhenish wine in the morning, and more in the afternoon at Mrs. Blackburne’s, came home and so to bed, not well, and very ill all night.

10th.  I had a great deal of pain all night, and a great loosing upon me so that I could not sleep.  In the morning I rose with much pain and to the office.  I went and dined at home, and after dinner with great pain in my back I went by water to Whitehall to the Privy Seal, and that done with Mr. Moore and Creed to Hide Park by coach, and saw a fine foot-race three times round the Park between an Irishman and Crow, that was once my Lord Claypoole’s footman. (By the way I cannot forget that my Lord Claypoole did the other day make enquiry of Mrs. Hunt, concerning my House in Axe-yard, and did set her on work to get it of me for him, which methinks is a very great change.) Crow beat the other by above two miles.  Returned from Hide Park, I went to my Lord’s, and took Will (who waited for me there) by coach and went home, taking my lute home with me.  It had been all this while since I came from sea at my Lord’s for him to play on.  To bed in some pain still.  For this month or two it is not imaginable how busy my head has been, so that I have neglected to write letters to my uncle Robert in answer to many of his, and to other friends, nor indeed have I done anything as to my own family, and especially this month my waiting at the Privy Seal makes me much more unable to think of anything, because of my constant attendance there after I have done at the Navy Office.  But blessed be God for my good chance of the Privy Seal, where I get every day I believe about L3.  This place I got by chance, and my Lord did give it me by chance, neither he nor I thinking it to be of the worth that he and I find it to be.  Never since I was a man in the world was I ever so great a stranger to public affairs as now I am, having not read a new book or anything like it, or enquiring after any news, or what the Parliament do, or in any wise how things go.  Many people look after my house in Axe-yard to hire it, so that I am troubled with them, and I have a mind to get the money to buy goods for my house at the Navy Office, and yet I am loth to put it off because that Mr. Man bids me L1000 for my office, which is so great a sum that I am loth to settle myself at my new house, lest I should take Mr. Man’s offer in case I found my Lord willing to it.