though not so good as he would have done at any other time of the year,
but such as I hope to make good use of, and get a little money by. So to
Sir G. Carteret's to dinner, and he and I and Captain Cocke all alone, and
good discourse, and thence to a Committee of Tangier at White Hall, and so
home, where I found my wife not well, and she tells me she thinks she is
with child, but I neither believe nor desire it. But God's will be done!
So to my office late, and home to supper and to bed; having got a strange
cold in my head, by flinging off my hat at dinner, and sitting with the
wind in my neck.

[In Lord Clarendon's Essay, "On the decay of respect paid to Age,"
he says that in his younger days he never kept his hat on before
those older than himself, except at dinner.--B.]

23rd. My cold and pain in my head increasing, and the palate of my mouth
falling, I was in great pain all night. My wife also was not well, so
that a mayd was fain to sit up by her all night. Lay long in the morning,
at last up, and amongst others comes Mr. Fuller, that was the wit of
Cambridge, and Praevaricator

[At the Commencement (Comitia Majora) in July, the Praevaricator, or
Varier, held a similar position to the Tripos at the Comitia Minora.
He was so named from varying the question which he proposed, either
by a play upon the words or by the transposition of the terms in
which it was expressed. Under the pretence of maintaining some
philosophical question, he poured out a medley of absurd jokes and
'personal ridicule, which gradually led to the abolition of the
office. In Thoresby's "Diary" we read, "Tuesday, July 6th. The
Praevaricator's speech was smart and ingenious, attended with
vollies of hurras" (see Wordsworth's "University Life in the