The Diary Samuel Pepys (love books to read .TXT) 📖

the end of the third book of Henry Lawes’s Select Ayres and Dialogues, 1669. Several editions, or reissues of this edition with changed title-pages and dates, were issued by Playford. (From information kindly supplied to the editor by Mr. J. E. Matthew.) ↩

The Royal African or Guinea Company of Merchants was founded 14 Car. II (1662). The limits of jurisdiction are defined in the charter as from Salee in South Barbary to the Cape of Good Hope. A new charter was granted in 1672, but in 1697 free trade to Africa was granted by parliament, and the company fell into decay. It was revived by a new act in the reign of Queen Anne (1708⁠–⁠9). An act for extending and improving the trade in Africa was passed 23 Geo. II (1754); but in 1821 the charter of incorporation of the society was recalled by parliament (1 and 2 Geo. IV, c. 28). In Strype’s Stow (book v) there is an account of the company, where the arms are described. The African House was in Leadenhall Street. ↩

Robert Montagu, Viscount Mandeville. He was appointed Envoy Extraordinary to Paris on this special mission in May, 1663. He succeeded his father as third Earl of Manchester in 1671, and died March 14th, 1683. ↩

These “fancies” appear to have been light airs, but their character has not been accurately defined. Falstaff, when speaking of Justice Shallow, says: “ ’a came ever in the rearward of the fashion, and sung those tunes to the overscutched huswives that he heard the carmen whistle, and sware they were his fancies or his good nights” (2 Henry IV, act iii, sc. 2). There is an interesting anecdote connected with these fancies in North’s Memories of Music (ed. Rimbault, 1846, p. 103): “King Charles the Second was a professed lover of music, but of this kind onely [light French style], and had an utter detestation of Fancys, and the less for a successless entertainment of that kind given him by Secretary Williamson, after which the Secretary had no peace, for the King (as his way was) could not forbear whetting his wits upon the subject of the fancy music, and its patron the Secretary.” Dr. Hueffer, in his “Mr. Pepys the Musician,” refers to Fancies, and is inclined to connect them with the Fantasia (Italian and Other Studies, 1883, p. 256). ↩

This word is here used as an optical term, and signifies the image painted on the retina of the eye, and the rays of light reflected from the several points of the surface of objects. —⁠B. ↩

16 Car. II, cap. 4, “An Act to prevent and suppresse seditious Conventicles.” It was enacted that anyone of the age of sixteen or upwards present at an unlawful assembly or conventicle was to incur fine or imprisonment. A conventicle was defined as an assembly of more than five persons besides the members of a family met together for holding worship not according to the rites of the Church of England. The act was amended 22 Car. II, cap. 1 (1670), and practically repealed by the Toleration Act of 1689, but the act 22 Car. II, cap. 1, was specially repealed 52 Geo. III, cap. 155, s. 1. ↩

Sir Balthazar Gerbier, born at Antwerp, 1592. He published many works connected with architecture, and was as much a painter as an architect. In 1649 ne opened an academy at Bethnal Green, in which he professed to teach, in addition to the more common branches of education, “astronomy, navigation, architecture, perspective, drawing, limning, engraving, fortification, fireworks, military discipline, the art of well speaking and civil discipline,” etc. etc. He also started in Whitefriars an academy for foreign languages. His “Counsel and Advise to all Builders” has forty-one separate dedicatory epistles to the Queen-mother, the Duke of York, Prince Rupert, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Earl of Clarendon, and a long list of the nobility and gentry, ending with the courteous reader. Gerbier died 1667. ↩

A comedy, by Sir Robert Stapylton, which was acted with applause, although Dryden made some unflattering criticisms on its construction. There does not appear to be any record of Mrs. Gosnell as an actress outside the Diary. According to Genest, Mrs. Betterton took the character of Pyramena on May 28th, the day before that mentioned in the text. ↩

Mary Moders, alias Stedman, a notorious impostor, who pretended to be a German princess. Her arrival as the German princess “at the Exchange Tavern, right against the Stocks betwixt the Poultry and Cornhill, at 5 in the morning.⁠ ⁠… , with her marriage to Carleton the taverner’s wife’s brother,” are incidents fully narrated in Francis Kirkman’s Counterfeit Lady Unveiled, 1673 (Boyne’s Tokens, ed. Williamson, vol. i, p. 703). Her adventures formed the plot of a tragicomedy by T. P., entitled A Witty Combat, or the Female Victor, 1663, which was acted with great applause by persons of quality in Whitsun week. Mary Carleton was tried at the Old Bailey for bigamy and acquitted, after which she appeared on the stage in her own character as the heroine of a play entitled The German Princess. Pepys went to the Duke’s House to see her on April 15th, 1664. The rest of her life was one continued course of robbery and fraud, and in 1678 she was executed at Tyburn for stealing a piece of plate in Chancery Lane. ↩

See note 1292 on the three brothers Honywood. ↩

The maypole in the Strand stood on the site of the church of St. Mary-le-Strand, and was a well-known object in 1634, when Captain Bailey set up there a stand for his hackney coaches. It was taken down by the Puritans, and re-erected