there with my wife, and to the office upon a particular meeting of the East India Company, where I think I did the King good service against the Company in the business of their sending our ships home empty from the Indies contrary to their contract, and yet, God forgive me!  I found that I could be willing to receive a bribe if it were offered me to conceal my arguments that I found against them, in consideration that none of my fellow officers, whose duty it is more than mine, had ever studied the case, or at this hour do understand it, and myself alone must do it.  That being done Mr. Povy and Bland came to speak with me about their business of the reference, wherein I shall have some more trouble, but cannot help it, besides I hope to make some good use of Mr. Povy to my advantage.  So home after business done at my office, to supper, and then to the globes with my wife, and so to bed.  Troubled a little in mind that my Lord Sandwich should continue this strangeness to me that methinks he shows me now a days more than while the thing was fresh.

26th.  Up and to the office, where we sat all the morning.  At noon to the ’Change, after being at the Coffee-house, where I sat by Tom Killigrew, who told us of a fire last night in my Lady Castlemaine’s lodging, where she bid L40 for one to adventure the fetching of a cabinet out, which at last was got to be done; and the fire at last quenched without doing much wrong.  To ’Change and there did much business, so home to dinner, and then to the office all the afternoon.  And so at night my aunt Wight and Mrs. Buggin came to sit with my wife, and I in to them all the evening, my uncle coming afterward, and after him Mr. Benson the Dutchman, a frank, merry man.  We were very merry and played at cards till late and so broke up and to bed in good hopes that this my friendship with my uncle and aunt will end well.

27th.  Up and to the office, and at noon to the Coffeehouse, where I sat with Sir G. Ascue

[Sir George Ayscue or Askew.  After his return from his imprisonment he declined to go to sea again, although he was twice afterwards formally appointed.  He sat on the court-martial on the loss of the “Defiance” in 1668.]

and Sir William Petty, who in discourse is, methinks, one of the most rational men that ever I heard speak with a tongue, having all his notions the most distinct and clear, and, among other things (saying, that in all his life these three books were the most esteemed and generally cried up for wit in the world “Religio Medici,” “Osborne’s Advice to a Son,”

[Francis Osborne, an English writer of considerable abilities and popularity, was the author of “Advice to a Son,” in two parts, Oxford, 1656-8, 8vo.  He died in 1659.  He is the same person mentioned as “My Father Osborne,” October 19th, 1661.—­B.]

and “Hudibras “), did say that in these—­in the two first principally—­the wit lies,