The Diary Of John Evelyn Vol-2

DIARY OF LONDON

Europe, as is said. She was born at Rome, educated in
France, and was an extraordinary beauty and wit, but
dissolute and impatient of matrimonial restraint, so as to
be abandoned by her husband, and banished, when she
came into England for shelter, lived on a pension given
her here, and is reported to have hastened her death by
intemperate drinking strong spirits. She has written her
own story and adventures, and so has her other extrava-
gant sister, wife to the noble family of Colonna.

i5th June, 1699. This week died Conyers Seymour,
son of Sir Edward Seymour, killed in a duel caused by
a slight affront in St, James's Park, given him by one
who was envious of his gallantries; for he was a vain,
foppish young man, who made a great tcldt about town
by his splendid equipage and boundless expense. He was
about twenty-three years old; his brother, now at Oxford,
inherited an estate of^"7,000 a year, which had fallen to
him not two years before.

19th June, 1699. My cousin, George Evelyn, of Nut-
field, died suddenly.

25th June, 1699. The heat has been so great, almost
all this month, that I do not remember to have felt much
greater in Italy, and this after a winter the wettest,
though not the coldest, that I remember for fifty years
last past.

aSth June, 1699. Finding my occasions called me so
often to London, I took the remainder of the lease my
son had in a house in Dover Street, to which I now re-
moved, not taking my goods from Wotton.

23d July, 1699. Seasonable showers, after a continuance
of excessive drought and heat.

August, 1699. I drank the Shooters* Hill waters. At
Deptford, they had been building a pretty new church.
The Bishop of St. David's [Watson] deprived for
simony.* The city of Moscow burnt by the throwing of
squibs.

3d September, 1699. There was in this week an
eclipse of the sun, at which many were frightened by
the predictions of the astrologers. I remember fifty
years ago that many were so terrified by Lilly, that they
dared not go out of their houses. A strange earthquake
at New Batavia, in the East Indies.

p- 330.e died 3 ist of July, 1714. King G-eorg-e