can play on one, and then echo it upon the other, which is mighty pretty.  So to my Lord Crew’s to dinner, where we hear all the good news of our making a league now with Holland against the French power coming over them, or us which is the first good act that hath been done a great while, and done secretly, and with great seeming wisdom; and is certainly good for us at this time, while we are in no condition to resist the French, if they should come over hither; and then a little time of peace will give us time to lay up something, which these Commissioners of the Treasury are doing; and the world do begin to see that they will do the King’s work for him, if he will let them.  Here dined Mr. Case, the minister, who, Lord! do talk just as I remember he used to preach, and did tell a pretty story of a religious lady, Queen of Navarre;

[Marguerite de Valois, Queen of Navarre, sister of Francis I. of France.  The “pretty story” was doubtless from her “Heptameron,” a work imitating in title and matter the “Decameron” of Boccaccio.  She is said to be the heroine of some of the adventures.  It is fair to add that she wrote also the “Miroir dune Ame Pecheresse,” translated into English by Queen Elizabeth, the title of whose book was “A Godly Medytacyon of the Christian Soules,” published by John Bale in 1548.—­B.]

and my Lord also told a good story of Mr. Newman, the Minister in New England, who wrote the Concordance, of his foretelling his death and preaching a funeral sermon, and did at last bid the angels do their office, and died.  It seems there is great presumption that there will be a Toleration granted:  so that the Presbyterians do hold up their heads; but they will hardly trust the King or the Parliament what to yield them, though most of the sober party be for some kind of allowance to be given them.  Thence and home, and then to the ’Change in the evening, and there Mr. Cade told me how my Lord Gerard is likely to meet with trouble, the next sitting of Parliament, about [Carr] being set in the pillory; and I am glad of it; and it is mighty acceptable to the world to hear, that, among other reductions, the King do reduce his Guards, which do please mightily.  So to my bookbinder’s with my boy, and there did stay late to see two or three things done that I had a mind to see done, and among others my Tangier papers of accounts, and so home to supper and to bed.

21st.  Up, and while at the office comes news from Kate Joyce that if I would see her husband alive, I must come presently.  So, after the office was up, I to him, and W. Hewer with me, and find him in his sick bed (I never was at their house, this Inne, before) very sensible in discourse and thankful for my kindness to him, and his breath rattled in his throate, and they did lay pigeons to his feet while I was in the house, and all despair of him, and with good reason.  But the story is that it seems on Thursday last he went sober and quiet out of doors