Window shopper

Up, and very busy to perform an oathe in finishing my Journall this morning for 7 or 8 days past. Then to several people attending upon business, among others Mr. Grant and the executors of Barlow for the 25l. due for the quarter before he died, which I scrupled to pay, being obliged but to pay every half year. Then comes Mr. Caesar, my boy’s lute-master, whom I have not seen since the plague before, but he hath been in Westminster all this while very well; and tells me in the height of it, how bold people there were, to go in sport to one another’s burials; and in spite too, ill people would breathe in the faces (out of their windows) of well people going by.
Then to dinner before the ‘Change, and so to the ‘Change, and then to the taverne to talk with Sir William Warren, and so by coach to several places, among others to my Lord Treasurer’s, there to meet my Lord Sandwich, but missed, and met him at [my] Lord Chancellor’s, and there talked with him about his accounts, and then about Sir G. Carteret, and I find by him that Sir G. Carteret has a worse game to play than my Lord Sandwich, for people are jeering at him, and he cries out of the business of Sir W. Coventry, who strikes at all and do all. Then to my bookseller’s, and then received some books I have new bought, and here late choosing some more to new bind, having resolved to give myself 10l. in books, and so home to the office and then home to supper, where Mr. Hill was and supped with us, and good discourse; an excellent person he still appears to me. After supper, and he gone, we to bed.

my breath in the window
of the bookseller’s

some books sing
some give me a home


Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Monday 12 February 1666.

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