Betty to see
us, and supped with us, and I shewed them a cold civility for fear of
troubling my wife, and after supper, they being gone, we to bed. Thus
ended this month, with very good content, that hath been the most sad
to my heart and the most expenseful to my purse on things of pleasure,
having furnished my wife's closet and the best chamber, and a coach
and horses, that ever I yet knew in the world: and do put me into the
greatest condition of outward state that ever I was in, or hoped ever to
be, or desired: and this at a time when we do daily expect great changes
in this Office: and by all reports we must, all of us, turn out. But
my eyes are come to that condition that I am not able to work: and
therefore that, and my wife's desire, make me have no manner of trouble
in my thoughts about it. So God do his will in it!

DECEMBER 1668

December 1st. Up, and to the office, where sat all the morning, and
at noon with my people to dinner, and so to the office, very busy
till night, and then home and made my boy read to me Wilkins's Reall
Character, which do please me mightily, and so after supper to bed with
great pleasure and content with my wife. This day I hear of poor Mr.
Clerke, the solicitor, being dead, of a cold, after being not above two
days ill, which troubles me mightily, poor man!

2nd. Up, and at the office all the morning upon some accounts of Sir
D. Gawden, and at noon abroad with W. Hewer, thinking to have found
Mr. Wren at Captain Cox's, to have spoke something to him about doing a
favour for Will's uncle Steventon, but missed him. And so back home and
abroad with my wife, the first time that ever I rode in my own coach,
which do make my heart rejoice, and praise God, and pray him to bless it
to me and continue it. So she and I to the King's playhouse, and there
sat to avoid seeing Knepp in a box above where Mrs. Williams happened to
be, and there saw "The Usurper;" a pretty good play, in all but what is
designed to resemble Cromwell and Hugh Peters, which is mighty silly.
The play done, we to White Hall; where my wife staid while I up to the
Duchesse's and Queen's side, to speak with the Duke of York: and here
saw all the ladies, and heard the silly discourse of the King, with his
people about him, telling a story of my Lord Rochester's having of his
clothes stole, while he was with a wench; and his gold all gone, but his
clothes found afterwards stuffed into a feather bed by the wench that