staid till it was late. At night
before I went to bed the barber came to trim me and wash me, and so to
bed, in order to my being clean to-morrow.

23rd. This day I went to my Lord, and about many other things at
Whitehall, and there made even my accounts with Mr. Shepley at my
Lord's, and then with him and Mr. Moore and John Bowles to the Rhenish
wine house, and there came Jonas Moore, the mathematician, to us, and
there he did by discourse make us fully believe that England and France
were once the same continent, by very good arguments, and spoke very
many things, not so much to prove the Scripture false as that the time
therein is not well computed nor understood. From thence home by water,
and there shifted myself into my black silk suit (the first day I have
put it on this year), and so to my Lord Mayor's by coach, with a great
deal of honourable company, and great entertainment. At table I had very
good discourse with Mr. Ashmole, wherein he did assure me that frogs
and many insects do often fall from the sky, ready formed. Dr. Bates's
singularity in not rising up nor drinking the King's nor other healths
at the table was very much observed.

[Dr. William Bates, one of the most eminent of the Puritan divines,
and who took part in the Savoy Conference. His collected writings
were published in 1700, and fill a large folio volume. The
Dissenters called him silver-tongued Bates. Calamy affirmed that if
Bates would have conformed to the Established Church he might have
been raised to any bishopric in the kingdom. He died in 1699, aged
seventy-four.]

From thence we all took coach, and to our office, and there sat till
it was late; and so I home and to bed by day-light. This day was kept a
holy-day through the town; and it pleased me to see the little boys walk
up and down in procession with their broom-staffs in their hands, as I
had myself long ago gone.

[Pepys here refers to the perambulation of parishes on Holy
Thursday, still observed. This ceremony was sometimes enlivened by
whipping the boys, for the better impressing on their minds the
remembrance of the day, and the boundaries of the parish, instead of
beating houses or stones. But this would not have harmonized well
with the excellent Hooker's practice on this day, when he "always
dropped some loving and facetious observations, to be remembered
against the next year, especial