29.  This is leap year, and this is leap day.  Prince George was born on this day.  People are mistaken; and some here think it is St. David’s Day; but they do not understand the virtue of leap year.  I have nothing to do now, boys, and have been reading all this day like Gumdragon; and yet I was dictating some trifles this morning to a printer.  I dined with a friend hard by, and the weather was so discouraging I could not walk.  I came home early, and have read two hundred pages of Arran.  Alexander the Great is just dead:  I do not think he was poisoned; betwixt you and me, all those are but idle stories:  it is certain that neither Ptolemy nor Aristobulus thought so, and they were both with him when he[12] died.  It is a pity we have not their histories.  The Bill for limiting Members of Parliament to have but so many places passed the House of Commons, and will pass the House of Lords, in spite of the Ministry, which you know is a great lessening of the Queen’s power.  Four of the new lords voted against the Court in this point.  It is certainly a good Bill in the reign of an ill prince, but I think things are not settled enough for it at present.  And the Court may want a majority upon a pinch.  Nite deelest logues.  Rove Pdfr.

March 1.  I went into the City to inquire after poor Stratford,[13] who has put himself a prisoner into the Queen’s Bench, for which his friends blame him much, because his creditors designed to be very easy with him.  He grasped at too many things together, and that was his ruin.  There is one circumstance relative to Lieutenant-General Meredith[14] that is very melancholy:  Meredith was turned out of all his employments last year, and had about 10,000 pounds left to live on.  Stratford, upon friendship, desired he might have the management of it for Meredith, to put it into the stocks and funds for the best advantage, and now he has lost it all.  You have heard me often talk of Stratford; we were class-fellows at school and university.  I dined with some merchants, his friends, to-day, and they said they expected his breaking this good while.  I gave him notice of a treaty of peace, while it was a secret, of which he might have made good use, but that helped to ruin him; for he gave money, reckoning there would be actually a peace by this time, and consequently stocks rise high.  Ford narrowly ’scaped losing 500 pounds by him, and so did I too.  Nite, my two deelest rives MD.

2.  Morning.  I was wakened at three this morning, my man and the people of the house telling me of a great fire in the Haymarket.  I slept again, and two hours after my man came in again, and told me it was my poor brother Sir William Wyndham’s[15] house burnt, and that two maids, leaping out of an upper room to avoid the fire, both fell on their heads, one of them upon the iron spikes before the door, and both lay dead in the streets.  It is supposed to have been some carelessness of one or both those