run to ruine, both house
and every thing in and about it, so ill furnished and miserably looked
after, I never did see in all my life. Not so much as a latch to his
dining-room door; which saved him nothing, for the wind blowing into the
room for want thereof, flung down a great bow pott that stood upon
the side-table, and that fell upon some Venice glasses, and did him
a crown's worth of hurt. He did give us the meanest dinner (of beef,
shoulder and umbles of venison

[Dr. Johnson was puzzled by the following passage in "The Merry
Wives of Windsor," act v., sc. 3: "Divide me like a bribe-buck, each
a haunch. I will keep the sides to myself; my shoulders for the
fellow of this walk." If he could have read the account of Sir
William Hickes's dinner, he would at once have understood the
allusion to the keeper's perquisites of the shoulders of all deer
killed in his walk.--B.]

which he takes away from the keeper of the Forest, and a few pigeons,
and all in the meanest manner) that ever I did see, to the basest
degree. After dinner we officers of the Navy stepped aside to read some
letters and consider some business, and so in again. I was only pleased
at a very fine picture of the Queene-Mother, when she was young, by
Van-Dike; a very good picture, and a lovely sweet face. Thence in the
afternoon home, and landing at Greenwich I saw Mr. Pen walking my way,
so we walked together, and for discourse I put him into talk of France,
when he took delight to tell me of his observations, some good, some
impertinent, and all ill told, but it served for want of better, and so
to my house, where I find my wife abroad, and hath been all this day,
nobody knows where, which troubled me, it being late and a cold evening.
So being invited to his mother's to supper, we took Mrs. Barbara, who
was mighty finely dressed, and in my Lady's coach, which we met going
for my wife, we thither, and there after some discourse went to supper.
By and by comes my wife and Mercer, and had been with Captain Cocke all
day, he coming and taking her out to go see his boy at school at Brumly
[Bromley], and brought her home again with great respect. Here pretty
merry, only I had no stomach, having dined late, to eat. After supper
Mr. Pen and I fell to discourse about some words in a French song my
wife was saying, "D'un air tout interdict," wherein I laid twenty to one
against him which he would not agree with me, though