(Lord’s day). Lay long in bed with pleasure with my wife, with whom I have now a great deal of content, and my mind is in other things also mightily more at ease, and I do mind my business better than ever and am more at peace, and trust in God I shall ever be so, though I cannot yet get my mind off from thinking now and then of Deb., but I do ever since my promise a while since to my wife pray to God by myself in my chamber every night, and will endeavour to get my wife to do the like with me ere long, but am in much fear of what she lately frighted me with about her being a Catholique; and I dare not, therefore, move her to go to church, for fear she should deny me; but this morning, of her own accord, she spoke of going to church the next Sunday, which pleases me mightily. This morning my coachman’s clothes come home; and I like the livery mightily, and so I all the morning at my chamber, and dined with my wife, and got her to read to me in the afternoon, till Sir W. Warren, by appointment, comes to me, who spent two hours, or three, with me, about his accounts of Gottenburgh, which are so confounded, that I doubt they will hardly ever pass without my doing something, which he desires of me, and which, partly from fear, and partly from unwillingness to wrong the King, and partly from its being of no profit to me, I am backward to give way to, though the poor man do indeed deserve to be rid of this trouble, that he hath lain so long under, from the negligence of this Board. We afterwards fell to other talk, and he tells me, as soon as he saw my coach yesterday, he wished that the owner might not contract envy by it; but I told him it was now manifestly for my profit to keep a coach, and that, after employments like mine for eight years, it were hard if I could not be justly thought to be able to do that.
He gone, my wife and I to supper; and so she to read, and made an end of the Life of Archbishop Laud, which is worth reading, as informing a man plainly in the posture of the Church, and how the things of it were managed with the same self-interest and design that every other thing is, and have succeeded accordingly. So to bed.
whoever I shall be
I cannot pray to myself
and I fear the sun
hours pass without me
years just end
plain and thin
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Sunday 29 November 1668.