Sent Messrs Margesson and Collison, in a bag made up into a parcel, by the team which goes in the denomination of Smith’s of Eastbourne, in cash 6.6.0… Scarce out of doors today. Gave a seaman, his wife and their son with a pass 12d on the parish account. Oh! what a change is there in my mind since Friday morning! Then was I all calm and serenity in my breast, but now all tumult and distraction. Oh! how pleasant are the ways of virtue, but how turbulent and rough are they of vice and wickedness! Well might the holy prophet say: “There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked”.
In the evening read the 1st Night of The Complaint. Today in reading of Read’s Weekly Journal, I find he attributes the present melancholy time to farmers’ etc. engrossing too much land in their hands, and he says that there is an act made in the 25th of Henry VIII whereby it is enacted if any person shall by any ways have more than two farms in his hands at one and the same time, and they to be both in the same parish, he shall forfeit 3/6 for each week that he shall so transgress the said statute.