being pulled down, who paid him for their wine licenses L15 a year.  But here it was said how these idle fellows have had the confidence to say that they did ill in contenting themselves in pulling down the little bawdyhouses, and did not go and pull down the great bawdy-house at White Hall.  And some of them have the last night had a word among them, and it was “Reformation and Reducement.”  This do make the courtiers ill at ease to see this spirit among people, though they think this matter will not come to much:  but it speaks people’s minds; and then they do say that there are men of understanding among them, that have been of Cromwell’s army:  but how true that is, I know not.  Thence walked a little to Westminster, but met with nobody to spend any time with, and so by coach homeward, and in Seething Lane met young Mrs. Daniel, and I stopt, and she had been at my house, but found nobody within, and tells me that she drew me for her Valentine this year, so I took her into the coach, and was going to the other end of the town, thinking to have taken her abroad, but remembering that I was to go out with my wife this afternoon, . . . and so to a milliner at the corner shop going into Bishopsgate and Leadenhall Street, and there did give her eight pair of gloves, and so dismissed her, and so I home and to dinner, and then with my wife to the King’s playhouse to see “The Storme,” which we did, but without much pleasure, it being but a mean play compared with “The Tempest,” at the Duke of York’s house, though Knepp did act her part of grief very well.  Thence with my wife and Deb. by coach to Islington, to the old house, and there eat and drank till it was almost night, and then home, being in fear of meeting the ’prentices, who are many of them yet, they say, abroad in the fields, but we got well home, and so I to my chamber a while, and then to supper and to bed.

26th.  Up betimes to the office, where by and by my Lord Brouncker and I met and made an end of our business betimes.  So I away with him to Mrs. Williams’s, and there dined, and thence I alone to the Duke of York’s house, to see the new play, called “The Man is the Master,” where the house was, it being not above one o’clock, very full.  But my wife and Deb. being there before, with Mrs. Pierce and Corbet and Betty Turner, whom my wife carried with her, they made me room; and there I sat, it costing me 8s. upon them in oranges, at 6d. a-piece.  By and by the King come; and we sat just under him, so that I durst not turn my back all the play.  The play is a translation out of French, and the plot Spanish, but not anything extraordinary at all in it, though translated by Sir W. Davenant, and so I found the King and his company did think meanly of it, though there was here and there something pretty:  but the most of the mirth was sorry, poor stuffe, of eating of sack posset and slabbering themselves, and mirth fit for clownes; the prologue but poor, and the epilogue little in