He says that the best light for his life to do a
very small thing by, (contrary to Chaucer's words to the Sun,
"that he should lend his light to them that small seals grave,")
it should be by an artificial light of a candle, set to
advantage, as he could do it. I find the fellow, by his
discourse, very ingenious: and among other things, a great
admirer and well read in the English poets, and undertakes to
judge of them all, and that not impertinently.
11th. Comes Cocker with my rule, which he hath engraved to
admiration, for goodness and smallness of work: it cost me 14s.
the doing. This day, for a wager before the King, my Lords of
Castlehaven and Arran, (a son of my Lord of Ormond's) they two
alone did run down and kill a stoute bucke in St. James's parke.
13th. To the new play, at the Duke's house, of "Henry the
Fifth;" a most noble play, writ by my Lord Orrery; wherein
Betterton, Harris, and Ianthe's parts most incomparably wrote and
done, and the whole play the most full of height and raptures of
wit and sense, that ever I heard; having but one incongruity,
that King Harry promises to plead for Tudor to their mistress,
Princesse Katherine of France, more than when it comes to it he
seems to do; and Tudor refused by her with some kind of
indignity, not with a difficulty and honour that it ought to have
been done in to him.
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