When he began the journal, he was a trifle prim and
puritanic; merry enough, to be sure, over his private cups,
and still remembering Magdalene ale and his acquaintance with
Mrs. Ainsworth of Cambridge. But youth is a hot season with
all; when a man smells April and May he is apt at times to
stumble; and in spite of a disordered practice, Pepys's
theory, the better things that he approved and followed
after, we may even say were strict. Where there was "tag,
rag, and bobtail, dancing, singing, and drinking," he felt
"ashamed, and went away;" and when he slept in church, he
prayed God forgive him. In but a little while we find him
with some ladies keeping each other awake "from spite," as
though not to sleep in church were an obvious hardship; and
yet later he calmly passes the time of service, looking about
him, with a perspective glass, on all the pretty women. His
favourite ejaculation, "Lord!" occurs but once that I have
observed in 1660, never in `61, twice in '62, and at least
five times in '63; after which the "Lords" may be said to
pullulate like herrings, with here and there a solitary
"damned," as it were a whale among the shoal. He and his
wife, once filled with dudgeon by some innocent freedoms at a
marriage, are soon content to go pleasuring with my Lord
Brouncker's mistress, who was not even, by his own account,
the most discreet of mistresses.
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