of the Treasury, it being so late, and our poverty grown so great, that they want where to set their feet, to begin to do any thing.  He tells me how weary he hath for this year and a half been of the war; and how in the Duke of York’s bedchamber, at Christ Church, at Oxford, when the Court was there, he did labour to persuade the Duke to fling off the care of the Navy, and get it committed to other hands; which, if he had done, would have been much to his honour, being just come home with so much honour from sea as he did.  I took notice of the sharp letter he wrote, which he sent us to read yesterday, to Sir Edward Spragg, where he is very plain about his leaving his charge of the ships at Gravesend, when the enemy come last up, and several other things:  a copy whereof I have kept.  But it is done like a most worthy man; and he says it is good, now and then, to tell these gentlemen their duties, for they need it.  And it seems, as he tells me, all our Knights are fallen out one with another, he, and Jenings, and Hollis, and (his words were) they are disputing which is the coward among them; and yet men that take the greatest liberty of censuring others!  Here, with him, very late, till I could hardly get a coach or link willing to go through the ruines; but I do, but will not do it again, being, indeed, very dangerous.  So home and to supper, and bed, my head most full of an answer I have drawn this noon to the Committee of the Council to whom Carcasses business is referred to be examined again.

10th.  Up, and to the Office, and there finished the letter about Carcasse, and sent it away, I think well writ, though it troubles me we should be put to trouble by this rogue so much.  At the office all the morning, and at noon home to dinner, where I sang and piped with my wife with great pleasure, and did hire a coach to carry us to Barnett to-morrow.  After dinner I to the office, and there wrote as long as my eyes would give me leave, and then abroad and to the New Exchange, to the bookseller’s there, where I hear of several new books coming out—­Mr. Spratt’s History of the Royal Society, and Mrs. Phillips’s’ poems.  Sir John Denham’s poems are going to be all printed together; and, among others, some new things; and among them he showed me a copy of verses of his upon Sir John Minnes’s going heretofore to Bullogne to eat a pig.

[The collected edition of Denham’s poems is dated 1668.  The verses
referred to are inscribed “To Sir John Mennis being invited from
Calice to Bologne to eat a pig,” and two of the lines run

                   “Little Admiral John
                    To Bologne is gone.”]

Cowley, he tells me, is dead; who, it seems, was a mighty civil, serious man; which I did not know before.  Several good plays are likely to be abroad soon, as Mustapha and Henry the 5th.  Here having staid and divertised myself a good while, I home again and to finish my letters by the post, and so home, and betimes to bed with my wife because of rising betimes to-morrow.