folly how the
house do this day cry up the play more than yesterday! and I for that
reason like it, I find, the better, too; by Sir Positive At-all, I
understand, is meant Sir Robert Howard. My Lady [Castlemaine] pretty
well pleased with it; but here I sat close to her fine woman, Willson,
who indeed is very handsome, but, they say, with child by the King. I
asked, and she told me this was the first time her Lady had seen it,
I having a mind to say something to her. One thing of familiarity I
observed in my Lady Castlemayne: she called to one of her women, another
that sat by this, for a little patch off her face, and put it into her
mouth and wetted it, and so clapped it upon her own by the side of her
mouth, I suppose she feeling a pimple rising there. Thence with Creed
to Westminster Hall, and there met with cozen Roger, who tells me of
the great conference this day between the Lords and Commons, about
the business of the East India Company, as being one of the weightiest
conferences that hath been, and managed as weightily. I am heartily
sorry I was not there, it being upon a mighty point of the privileges
of the subjects of England, in regard to the authority of the House of
Lords, and their being condemned by them as the Supreme Court, which, we
say, ought not to be, but by appeal from other Courts. And he tells
me that the Commons had much the better of them, in reason and history
there quoted, and believes the Lords will let it fall. Thence to walk in
the Hall, and there hear that Mrs. Martin's child, my god-daughter,
is dead, and so by water to the Old Swan, and thence home, and there a
little at Sir W. Pen's, and so to bed.

6th. Up, and to the office, and thence to White Hall, but come too
late to see the Duke of York, with whom my business was, and so to
Westminster Hall, where met with several people and talked with them,
and among other things understand that my Lord St. John is meant by Mr.
Woodcocke, in "The Impertinents."

["Whilst Positive walks, like Woodcock in the park,
Contriving projects with a brewer's clerk."

Andrew Marvell's "Instructions to a Painter," part iii., to which is
subjoined the following note: "Sir Robert Howard, and Sir William
Bucknell, the brewer."--Works, ed. by Capt. E. Thompson, vol.
iii., p. 405.--B.]

Here met with Mrs. Washington, my old acquaintance of the Hall, whose
husband has a place in the Excise at Windsor, and it seems l