Month: January 1641

I gave a visit to my cousin Hatton, of Ditton ((Thames Ditton -GS)).

1641.  It was a sad and lugubrious beginning of the year, when on the 2d of January, 1640-1, we at night followed the mourning hearse to the church at Wotton; when, after a sermon and funeral oration by the minister, my father was interred (( On the north wall of the Wotton Dormitory. His epitaph says he died on the 20th December.  – Footnote by Austin Dobson )) near his formerly erected monument, and mingled with the ashes of our mother, his dear wife. Thus we were bereft of both our parents in a period when we most of all stood in need of their counsel and assistance, especially myself, of a raw, vain, uncertain, and very unwary inclination: but so it pleased God to make trial of my conduct in a conjuncture of the greatest and most prodigious hazard that ever the youth of England saw; and, if I did not amidst all this impeach my liberty nor my virtue with the rest who made shipwreck of both, it was more the infinite goodness and mercy of God than the least providence or discretion of mine own, who now thought of nothing but the pursuit of vanity, and the confused imaginations of young men.