yesterday, but I could not. Met with Creed and walked with him a turne or
two in the Parke, but without much content, having now designs of getting
money in my head, which allow me not the leisure I used to have with him,
besides an odde story lately told of him for a great truth, of his
endeavouring to lie with a woman at Oxford, and her crying out saved her;
and this being publickly known, do a little make me hate him. Thence took
coach, and calling by the way at my bookseller's for a booke I writ about
twenty years ago in prophecy of this year coming on, 1666, explaining it
to be the marke of the beast, I home, and there fell to reading, and then
to supper, and to bed.

19th. Up, and by coach to my Lord Sandwich's, but he was gone out. So I
to White Hall, and there waited on the Duke of Yorke with some of the rest
of our brethren, and thence back again to my Lord's, to see my Lord
Hinchingbroke, which I did, and I am mightily out of countenance in my
great expectation of him by others' report, though he is indeed a pretty
gentleman, yet nothing what I took him for, methinks, either as to person
or discourse discovered to me, but I must try him more before I go too far
in censuring. Hence to the Exchequer from office to office, to set my
business of my tallys in doing, and there all the morning. So at noon by
coach to St. Paul's Church-yarde to my Bookseller's, and there bespoke a
few more books to bring all I have lately bought to L10. Here I am told
for certain, what I have heard once or twice already, of a Jew in town,
that in the name of the rest do offer to give any man L10 to be paid L100,
if a certain person now at Smyrna be within these two years owned by all
the Princes of the East, and particularly the grand Signor as the King of
the world, in the same manner we do the King of England here, and that
this man is the true Messiah. One named a friend of his that had received
ten pieces in gold upon this score, and says that the Jew hath disposed of
L1100 in this manner, which is very strange; and certainly this year of