“The best of a bad bargain.”

“Now public business takes up so much of my time that I must get time a Sundays or a nights to look after my own matters.”

“Perhaps the most irrational fashion act of all was the male habit for 150 years of wearing wigs. Samuel Pepys, as with so many things, was in the vanguard, noting with some apprehension the purchase of a wig in 1663 when wigs were not yet common. It was such a novelty that he feared people would laugh at him in church; he was greatly relieved, and a little proud, to find that they did not. He also worried, not unreasonably, that the hair of wigs might come from plague victims. Perhaps nothing says more about the power of fashion than that Pepys continued wearing wigs even while wondering if they might kill him.”

“Saw a wedding in the church. It was strange to see what delight we married people have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition.”

“As happy a man as any in the world, for the whole world seems to smile upon me!”

“Strange to see how a good dinner and feasting reconciles everybody.”

“Music and women I cannot but give way to whatever my business is.”

“I did this night promise my wife never to go to bed without calling upon God upon my knees in prayer.”

“The best of a bad bargain.”

“Strange, to see what delight we married people have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition, every man and wife gazing and smiling at them. ”

“Though Charles II both craved and enjoyed female companionship till the end of his life, there is no question that by the cold, rainy autumn of 1682 his physical appetites had diminshed considerably. The Duchess of Portsmouth was, after all, more than twenty years his junior; and there comes a time in nearly every such relationship when the male partner is simply unable to fully accommodate the female partner. Or as Samuel Pepys tartly noted in his diary, "the king yawns much in council, it is thought he spends himself overmuch in the arms of Madame Louise, who far from being wearied, seems fresher than ever after sporting with the king.”