Incommensurable

Up, and at the office all this morning, and then home to dinner, and then by coach sent my wife to the King’s playhouse, and I to White Hall, there intending, with Lord Bruncker, Sir J. Minnes, and Sir T. Harvy to have seen the Duke of York, whom it seems the King and Queen have visited, and so we may now well go to see him. But there was nobody could speak with him, and so we parted, leaving a note in Mr. Wren’s chamber that we had been there, he being at the free conference of the two Houses about this great business of my Lord Chancellor’s, at which they were at this hour, three in the afternoon, and there they say my Lord Anglesey do his part admirably ably, and each of us taking a copy of the Guinny Company’s defence to a petition against them to the Parliament the other day. So I away to the King’s playhouse, and there sat by my wife, and saw “The Mistaken Beauty,” which I never, I think, saw before, though an old play; and there is much in it that I like, though the name is but improper to it — at least, that name, it being also called “The Lyer,” which is proper enough. Here I met with Sir. Richard Browne, who wondered to find me there, telling me that I am a man of so much business, which character, I thank God, I have ever got, and have for a long time had and deserved, and yet am now come to be censured in common with the office for a man of negligence.
Thence home and to the office to my letters, and then home to supper and to bed.

who but the body
could speak about sin

each of us taking on
a mistaken beauty

like the name of a god
in common letters

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Thursday 28 November 1667.

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