Linda
Annotations and comments
Linda has posted 17 annotations/comments since 11 January 2016.
The most recent first…
Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
Linda has posted 17 annotations/comments since 11 January 2016.
The most recent first…
Comments
Second Reading
About Friday 4 November 1664
Linda • Link
I would love to know more about those anchors. Before the advent of today's efficient patented anchors, I can't imagine how they could have kept those enormous ships in place.
About Mary Villiers (Duchess of Buckingham)
Linda • Link
The description of Queen Catherine attributed to Mary, Duchess of Buckingham, accords with what Germans call a Sitzriese, or "sitting giant." Goethe is also said to have been a Sitzriese.
About Wednesday 24 August 1664
Linda • Link
I love Sandwich's salty talk. I wonder why he stopped "thwart off the Ness" and why he then "went ashore at the light-house." Since he weighed after that and plyed up to a point where Crewe and Isham came aboard in a smack, perhaps he had picked up some intel to relay to them.
About Saturday 30 July 1664
Linda • Link
Terry's post regarding "the Troubles prefigured . . . Ossory to Ormond" in 1664 -- regarding "force . . . to take children out of the hands of their nearest relatives, and to breed them up in a different faith than theirs" in Ireland -- brings to mind the parallel universe of this practice in England, namely the contemporaneous bringing up of Mary and Anne, the daughters of the Catholic Duke of York James and his wife Anne Hyde, as Protestants, no doubt at the insistence of then-Protestant-for-form's-sake-because-he-was-perforce-Fidei-Defensor-or-Head-of-the-Church-of-England King Charles II.
This destined first Mary and then Anne for the Crown, but also for lives of "troubles," Mary being very unhappily married and childless and Anne being the mother of eighteen(!) children who died young.
It meant lives of royal misery for them.
About Saturday 2 April 1664
Linda • Link
GrahamT and djc
If the solution to Fermat's Last Theorem was elegant, unlike the current one, it would fit on a beermat.
About Thursday 31 March 1664
Linda • Link
JonTom Kittredge:
I have often wondered how Pepys could have been such a great Latin student if he failed to use the correct accusative forms in English. I studied Latin and Greek and taught German for many years and always stressed to the students that one of the main arguments for study of foreign languages is that it would give them the ability to use English (especially "whom" :-D) correctly.
About Saturday 19 March 1663/64
Linda • Link
This regards "a good hen, with eggs." Remember that the punctuation is not Pepys's. It may well mean "a good hen with [unhatched] eggs [inside]," as suggested above, such as the Jewish dish called eyerlekh, which is now a rarity partly because of modern methods of slaughtering chickens and also because laying hens are considered only good for soup at the end of their laying career. Here's a link to eyerlekh:
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-l…
About Friday 5 February 1663/64
Linda • Link
We're living in a brave new world :-)
About Sunday 31 January 1663/64
Linda • Link
Mountebank, thank you so much for the reference to Pooter. His diary is hilarious, a real treat.
And Louise, all I know about the location of the royal guineas is "The king was in his counting-house, counting out his money."
About Thursday 12 November 1663
Linda • Link
San Diego Sarah, the article came up for me. It concerns a rare allergy to semen.
About Sunday 12 July 1663
Linda • Link
Thanks, E.
About Wednesday 15 April 1663
Linda • Link
Isn't it good,
Norwegian wood.
About Tuesday 1 May 1660
Linda • Link
Thank you for the Herrick poem. The excitement of May is palpable in it, well worth celebrating. I saw the May dancers, each one with his personal "Maypole," at Portsmouth by the HMS Victory in 2011 -- very ribald, surprising to this American.
About Tuesday 17 February 1662/63
Linda • Link
Remember that Sam himself was dissected, in a sense, in that his friends(!) autopsied his body after he died.
About Friday 30 January 1662/63
Linda • Link
As for me, I'm busy looking up Ruth 3:4 & 8 and Isaiah 6:2.
About Tuesday 13 January 1662/63
Linda • Link
There were Turnspit Dogs that powered jacks, and then there were human-wound "clockwork jacks." King Charles II himself, who, when he as a youth he was escaping incognito from England, pretended to be a kitchen worker and was lambasted by the chef for not knowing how to wind the clockwork jack.
About Saturday 10 January 1662/63
Linda • Link
Thank you, John York, I have a lot of deer-hunting friends here in the American Deep South and will try to get one of them to give me some raw venison so that I can try to make a pasty. Trouble is, they generally take the deer directly to a deer butcher, who grinds it up and makes sausage out of it.
As far as the labels "careerist" and "cunning knave" are concerned, Sam is definitely a careerist (like Creed) and like Creed is a cunning knave himself.