so to
supper, and, for the ease of my eyes, to bed, having first ended all my
letters at the office.

27th. Up, and to the office, where very busy all the morning. While I
was busy at the Office, my wife sends for me to come home, and what was it
but to see the pretty girl which she 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 the