In the morning at my lute an hour, and so to my office, where I staid expecting to have Mr. Squib come to me, but he did not. At noon walking in the Hall I found Mr. Swan and got him and Captain Stone together, and there advised about Mr. Downing’s business. So to Will’s, and sat there till three o’clock and then to Mr. Swan’s, where I found his wife in very genteel mourning for her father, and took him out by water to the Counsellor at the Temple, Mr. Stephens, and from thence to Gray’s Inn, thinking to speak with Solicitor Ellis, but found him not, so we met with an acquaintance of his in the walks, and went and drank, where I ate some bread and butter, having ate nothing all day, while they were by chance discoursing of Marriot, the great eater, so that I was, I remember, ashamed to eat what I would have done. Here Swan shewed us a ballad to the tune of Mardike which was most incomparably wrote in a printed hand, which I borrowed of him, but the song proved but silly, and so I did not write it out. Thence we went and leaving Swan at his master’s, my Lord Widdrington, I met with Spicer, Washington, and D. Vines in Lincoln’s Inn Court, and they were buying of a hanging jack to roast birds on of a fellow that was there selling of some. I was fain to slip from there and went to Mrs. Crew’s to her and advised about a maid to come and be with Mrs. Jem while her maid is sick, but she could spare none. Thence to Sir Harry Wright’s, but my lady not being within I spoke to Mrs. Carter about it, who will get one against Monday. So with a link boy to Scott’s, where Mrs. Ann was in a heat, but I spoke not to her, but told Mrs. Jem what I had done, and after that went home and wrote letters into the country by the post, and then played awhile on my lute, and so done, to supper and then to bed.
All the news to-day is, that the Parliament this morning voted the House to be made up four hundred forthwith.
This day my wife killed her turkeys that Mr. Sheply gave her, that came out of Zealand with my Lord, and could not get her m’d Jane by no means at any time to kill anything.
a stone in mourning for the temple
I was
a hanging jack to roast birds
that heat
could kill anything
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Saturday 4 February 1659/60. (See the original erasure.)