Annotations and comments

Terry Foreman has posted 16,447 annotations/comments since 28 June 2005.

Comments

First Reading

About Capt. William Badiley

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"Master-Attendant, Deptford 1654; reappointed 1660. Probably brother of Richard, the naval commander (d. 1657)." L&M Companion, 17.

About Thomas Hailes

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Exchequer official; buried at St. Margaret's Westminster, the week of 14 August 1662. (L&M, iii.174.n.1.)

About Friday 22 August 1662

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"I did get of him a draught of Tangier to take a copy by"

Sounds at first like an exotic drink, but an L&M note says: "Sandwich had done a drawing of Tangier roads, November 1661. A copy survives in BL, King's Maps, CXVII 77. Pepys's copy had not been traced."

Q. re "Tangier roads": are we talking the harbor or what's onshore?

About Thursday 21 August 1662

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Tempted again today, Sam didn't mention God.

Why doesn't he explicitly credit his aunt with being an agent of Divine intervention?

Afraid I find his negotations in this respect, ah, interesting.

About Thursday 21 August 1662

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"to carry them to Greenwich"

This sense of "carry" ("give a ride to") is idiomatic among the older folk in the US mid-South, though not north, NE, or NW of here, nor on either Coast, as far as I know.

About Thursday 21 August 1662

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My grammar is slipping

Thanks muchly, Dirk: I knew that cold 45 years ago and LOVED diagramming sentences; the tenses and moods are still with me.

About Thursday 21 August 1662

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"yet how easily was I of my own accord stirred up to desire [that I carry] my aunt and this pretty lady (for it was for her that I [desired] it)...to Greenwich and see the pleasure boats."

I forget the name of this kind of subordinate clause, but it seems to be one that Sam doesn't use.?

About Wednesday 20 August 1662

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Thank God

No dispute, Don McCahill, about what you say about the general mind. But I sense gradations in Sam's uses, and he writes on the cusp of changes, cultural and personal.
(1) The entries in John Evelyn's diary provided by Dirk are evidence of an emerging Baconian naturalism, which abjured mixing knowledge and faith in explanation (rejected per se by Newton and Boyle), signal a major cognitive/cultural change;
(2) Pepys himself will participate in his way in a change of mores before very long (hence the recent discussion of the “coded passages”).

About Wednesday 20 August 1662

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(A. Hamilton & Stolzi, I GO POGO also; I'm not aware of a plan to republish those treasures; my sons will fight over my trove when I die.)

About Wednesday 20 August 1662

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"by God's blessing,…thank God,…(God forgive me)”

How do these differ, or do they?
Australian Susan: “Well, he's giving the credit to God here, but it is his hard work which has done it,” a POV he shares as soon as he finds himself with a glass of wine at his lips — but just sips? (“thank God” — mild imprecation), and rushes back to the office; then his usual prayer for forgiveness when he contemplates or does what he oughn’t.

Are these all throwaways? Or the first like a punctilious “signing himself,” and the last his conscience at work, as in the transparent “coded passages” — a very interesting transaction with himself as a Diarist, an internal dialogue, perhaps not entirely unrelated to the one I suggested above — that he was excusing himself now for not recalling something later.

I wouldn’t bring this up were such formulae not so frequent, or, as A.S. suggests [to me], somewhat dissonant.

About Wednesday 20 August 1662

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"things I heard which yet I understand not, and so cannot remember."

Methinks a keen observation on the way memory works: hard to retrieve what has no hook to hang it on (context in which it "fits").

Was this a truism? I note the "so" = "therefore," as though this was well-known, at least to him: he tells his Diary there was much more told about Tangier, but he has an excuse for not writing it down.
(Interesting transaction with himself.)

About Wednesday 20 August 1662

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The dangers of dining ensemble vs. the virtue of eating alone

"But I do find my nature ready to run back to my old course of drinking wine and staying from my business, and yet, thank God, I was not fully contented with it, but did stay at little ease, and after dinner hastened home by water, and so to my office till late at night."

Is this perhaps the explanation of Sam's much-remarked-on recent habit of "dining alone"? Boy, did he do penance instanter!

About Tuesday 19 August 1662

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I suppose one might say that the duel was foreplay to the Duke of Buckingham's lewd affair with the late Shrewsbury's wife.

Today in Kansas a man began serving a life-sentence for 10 murders that terrorized the city of Wichita, a city of over 300,000 for 17 years: after the murders he was sexually aroused. Compared to Dennis Rader, Buckingham was a piker.

About Tuesday 19 August 1662

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Jeannine, thanks for another "Bedchamber" narrative, and the useful suggestion of someone doing what was called in school when I was 12 a "sociogram" (we were asked to ID and rank 3 whom we would most like to work with on a project). In a few months the whole crewe will be seated on the Tangier Committee for Trade and Plantations!!

About Monday 18 August 1662

Terry F.  •  Link

Wheatley's "half-square" note
over L&M's "off-square" reading.

Wim van der Meij and GrahamT, kudos!

As one who, ah, helped spark the puzzlement here, let me join Martin in thanking you both muchly -- making clear why Sam's measuring of tables, etc., was so helpful to him.

I am also impressed with how our Mr. Pepys goes to the root of it in Walthem Forest, studies the hewing itself with Mr. Cooper's help; follows the path the timbers go down to the river where they are loaded for water-transport to Woolwich, where he has seen them stacked (perhaps even offloaded)! http://www.streetmap.co.uk/newmap… And now back to study what he was exposed to in the Forest: exemplary MBA method, following the supply-chain on the ground.

About Tuesday 19 August 1662

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"the duell between Mr. Jermyn,...and Colonel Giles Rawlins, ...the first mortally wounded, as it is thought."

L&M note: "This was a quarrel over the Countess of Shrewsbury: the duels were fought on the 17th [last Sunday!], and are described in [two books Pepys owned]. Jermyn survived.”

“The Court is much concerned in this fray, and I am glad of it; hoping that it will cause some good laws against it.”

L&M note: "Duelling was prohibited by royal proclamations and (for officers of the armed services) by the articles of war. The most recent proclamation (13 August 1660: Steele, no. 3245) had been ineffective. The King actually pardoned the Duke of Buckingham for his part in the worst duel of the reign in 1668…. Proclamations (often repeated) remained futile until manners changed.”

About Tuesday 19 August 1662

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"my Lord has put me into Commission... for Tangier"

L&M note: "See [27 October] Similar committees [to oversee trade and economic development] existed for a few but not all other colonies: C.M. Andrews, *Brit. committees of trade and plantations*, p. 80.”