er passing his accounts. Thence home a
little to look after my people at work and back to Sir G. Carteret's
to dinner; and thence, after some discourse; with him upon our publique
accounts, I back home, and all the day with Harman and his people
finishing the hangings and beds in my house, and the hangings will be as
good as ever, and particularly in my new closet. They gone and I weary,
my wife and I, and Balty and his wife, who come hither to-day to helpe
us, to a barrel of oysters I sent from the river today, and so to bed.

18th. Strange with what freedom and quantity I pissed this night, which
I know not what to impute to but my oysters, unless the coldness of the
night should cause it, for it was a sad rainy and tempestuous night.
Soon as up I begun to have some pain in my bladder and belly, as usual,
which made me go to dinner betimes, to fill my belly, and that did ease
me, so as I did my business in the afternoon, in forwarding the settling
of my house, very well. Betimes to bed, my wife also being all this day
ill in the same manner. Troubled at my wife's haire coming off so much.
This day the Parliament met, and adjourned till Friday, when the King
will be with them.

19th. Up, and with Sir W. Pen by coach to St. James's, and there did
our usual business before the Duke of Yorke; which signified little, our
business being only complaints of lack of money. Here I saw a bastard
of the late King of Sweden's come to kiss his hands; a mighty modish
French-like gentleman. Thence to White Hall, with Sir W. Batten and Sir
W. Pen, to Wilkes's; and there did hear the many profane stories of
Sir Henry Wood damning the parsons for so much spending the wine at the
sacrament, cursing that ever they took the cup to themselves, and then
another story that he valued not all the world's curses, for two pence
he shall get at any time the prayers of some poor body that is worth
a 1000 of all their curses; Lord Norwich drawing a tooth at a health.
Another time, he and Pinchbacke and Dr. Goffe, now a religious man,
Pinchbacke did begin a frolick to drink out of a glass with a toad in it
that he had taken up going out to shit, he did it without harm. Goffe,
who knew sacke would kill the toad, called for sacke; and when he saw it
dead, says he, "I will have a quick toad, and will not drink from a dead
toad."

["They swallow their own contradictions as easily as a hector can
drink a frog in a glass of wine."--Benlivoglio