boasting man as any I know, as if the whole City and Kingdom had all its
work done by him. He tells me he hath now got a street ordered to be
continued, forty feet broad, from Paul's through Cannon Street to the
Tower, which will be very fine. He and others this day, where I was in
the afternoon, do tell me of at least six or eight fires within these few
days; and continually stirs of fires, and real fires there have been, in
one place or other, almost ever since the late great fire, as if there was
a fate sent people for fire. I walked over the Park to Sir W. Coventry's.
Among other things to tell him what I hear of people being forced to sell
their bills before September for 35 and 40 per cent. loss, and what is
worst, that there are some courtiers that have made a knot to buy them, in
hopes of some ways to get money of the King to pay them, which Sir W.
Coventry is amazed at, and says we are a people made up for destruction,
and will do what he can to prevent all this by getting the King to provide
wherewith to pay them. We talked of Tangier, of which he is ashamed; also
that it should put the King to this charge for no good in the world: and
now a man going over that is a good soldier, but a debauched man, which
the place need not to have. And so used these words: "That this place was
to the King as my Lord Carnarvon says of wood, that it is an excrescence
of the earth provided by God for the payment of debts." Thence away to
Sir G. Carteret, whom I find taking physic. I staid talking with him but
a little, and so home to church, and heard a dull sermon, and most of the
best women of our parish gone into the country, or at least not at church.
So home, and find my boy not there, nor was at church, which vexed me, and
when he come home I enquired, he tells me he went to see his mother. I
send him back to her to send me some token that he was with her. So there
come a man with him back of good fashion. He says he saw him with her,
which pacified me, but I did soundly threaten him before him, and so to
dinner, and then had a little scolding with my wife for not being fine
enough to go to the christening to-day, which she excused by being ill, as