its, though the badness of my eyes,
making me unfit to read or write long, is my excuse, and do put me upon
other pleasures and employment which I should refrain from in observation
of my vowes.

9th. Up; and to the office, where all the morning, and at noon comes
Creed to dine with me. After dinner, he and I and my wife to the
Bear-Garden, to see a prize fought there. But, coming too soon, I left
them there and went on to White Hall, and there did some business with the
Lords of the Treasury; and here do hear, by Tom Killigrew and Mr. Progers,
that for certain news is come of Harman's having spoiled nineteen of
twenty-two French ships, somewhere about the Barbadoes, I think they said;
but wherever it is, it is a good service, and very welcome. Here I fell
in talk with Tom Killigrew about musick, and he tells me that he will
bring me to the best musick in England (of which, indeed, he is master),
and that is two Italians and Mrs. Yates, who, he says, is come to sing the
Italian manner as well as ever he heard any: says that Knepp won't take
pains enough, but that she understands her part so well upon the stage,
that no man or woman in the House do the like. Thence I by water to the
Bear-Garden, where now the yard was full of people, and those most of them
seamen, striving by force to get in, that I was afeard to be seen among
them, but got into the ale-house, and so by a back-way was put into the
bull-house, where I stood a good while all alone among the bulls, and was
afeard I was among the bears, too; but by and by the door opened, and I
got into the common pit; and there, with my cloak about my face, I stood
and saw the prize fought, till one of them, a shoemaker, was so cut in
both his wrists that he could not fight any longer, and then they broke
off: his enemy was a butcher. The sport very good, and various humours to
be seen among the rabble that is there. Thence carried Creed to White
Hall, and there my wife and I took coach and home, and both of us to Sir
W. Batten's, to invite them to dinner on Wednesday next, having a whole
buck come from Hampton Court, by the warrant which Sir Stephen Fox did
give me. And so home to supper and to bed, after a little playing on the
flageolet with my wife, who do outdo therein whatever I expected of her.

10th. Up, and all the morning at the Office, where little to do but
bemoan ourselves under the want of money; and indeed little is, or can be
done, for want of money