he is taking to wait upon her: and
though she seems not altogether so great a beauty as she had before told
me, yet indeed she is mighty pretty; and so pretty, that I find I shall
be too much pleased with it, and therefore could be contented as to my
judgement, though not to my passion, that she might not come, lest I may
be found too much minding her, to the discontent of my wife. She is
to come next week. She seems, by her discourse, to be grave beyond her
bigness and age, and exceeding well bred as to her deportment, having
been a scholar in a school at Bow these seven or eight years. To the
office again, my head running on this pretty girl, and there till noon,
when Creed and Sheres come and dined with me; and we had a great deal
of pretty discourse of the ceremoniousness of the Spaniards, whose
ceremonies are so many and so known, that, Sheres tells me, upon all
occasions of joy or sorrow in a Grandee's family, my Lord Embassador is
fain to send one with an 'en hora buena', if it be upon a marriage, or
birth of a child, or a 'pesa me', if it be upon the death of a child,
or so. And these ceremonies are so set, and the words of the compliment,
that he hath been sent from my Lord, when he hath done no more than send
in word to the Grandee that one was there from the Embassador; and he
knowing what was his errand, that hath been enough, and he never spoken
with him: nay, several Grandees having been to marry a daughter, have
wrote letters to my Lord to give him notice, and out of the greatness of
his wisdom to desire his advice, though people he never saw; and then my
Lord he answers by commending the greatness of his discretion in making
so good an alliance, &c., and so ends. He says that it is so far from
dishonour to a man to give private revenge for an affront, that the
contrary is a disgrace; they holding that he that receives an affront
is not fit to appear in the sight of the world till he hath revenged
himself; and therefore, that a gentleman there that receives an affront
oftentimes never appears again in the world till he hath, by some
private way or other, revenged himself: and that, on this account,
several have followed their enemies privately to the Indys, thence to
Italy, thence to France and back again, watching for an opportunity to
be revenged. He says my Lord was fain to keep a letter from the Duke of
York to the Queen of Spain a great while in his hands, before he could
think fit to deliver it, till