20th. Up and to the office, where we sat; and at noon Sir G. Carteret,
Sir J. Minnes, and I to dinner to my Lord Mayor's, being invited, where
was the Farmers of the Customes, my Lord Chancellor's three sons, and
other great and much company, and a very great noble dinner, as this
Mayor--[Sir John Robinson.]--is good for nothing else. No extraordinary
discourse of any thing, every man being intent upon his dinner, and
myself willing to have drunk some wine to have warmed my belly, but I
did for my oath's sake willingly refrain it, but am so well pleased
and satisfied afterwards thereby, for it do keep me always in so good a
frame of mind that I hope I shall not ever leave this practice. Thence
home, and took my wife by coach to White Hall, and she set down at
my Lord's lodgings, I to a Committee of Tangier, and thence with her
homeward, calling at several places by the way. Among others at Paul's
Churchyard, and while I was in Kirton's shop, a fellow came to offer
kindness or force to my wife in the coach, but she refusing, he went
away, after the coachman had struck him, and he the coachman. So I being
called, went thither, and the fellow coming out again of a shop, I did
give him a good cuff or two on the chops, and seeing him not oppose me,
I did give him another; at last found him drunk, of which I was glad,
and so left him, and home, and so to my office awhile, and so home
to supper and to bed. This evening, at my Lord's lodgings, Mrs. Sarah
talking with my wife and I how the Queen do, and how the King tends
her being so ill. She tells us that the Queen's sickness is the spotted
fever; that she was as full of the spots as a leopard which is very
strange that it should be no more known; but perhaps it is not so. And
that the King do seem to take it much to heart, for that he hath wept
before her; but, for all that; that he hath not missed one night since
she was sick, of supping with my Lady Castlemaine; which I believe is
true, for she [Sarah] says that her husband hath dressed the suppers
every night; and I confess I saw him myself coming through the street
dressing of a great supper to-night, which Sarah says is also for the
King and her; which is a very strange thing.

21st. Up, and by and by comes my brother Tom to me, though late (which
do vex me to the blood that I could never get him to come time enough
to me, though I have spoke a hundred times; but he is very sluggish, and
too negligent ever to do well at h