…Paid Thomas Overing 4/6 in full on account for Mrs Weller for new leading of the windows etc. of this house. We dined on a pike baked in Durrant’s oven, a light pudding, some calves’ liver and lights boiled and minced. After dinner walked up to Mr John Vine’s with some things for the audit. Thomas Durrant at our house in the evening. In the day read part of the 1st volume of The Peerage of England. A great deal of snow fell in the forenoon, but melted chiefly as it fell. A very sharp frost in the morning and most prodigious cold all day.
This day I received a letter from Mr Sterry wherein he informs me that the temporary bridge, lately erected of wood for the benefit of passage while London Bridge was taken down in order to be repaired, took fire on Tuesday night last about 11 o’clock and was entirely consumed and burnt down, even to the water edge. It is supposed to be set on fire by some malicious and evil-disposed person. Now could it be thought that in a Christian land, and more especial, among a people that profess the protestant religion in its primitive purity, that there could be a wretch among us so wicked as to perpetrate so black and horrid a crime? But oh, what a convincing proof is this of the predominancy of vice and wickedness in this irreligious age when any crime is not so much deemed a vice in the perpetrator when the cause of it proceeds from something that was in appearance a nuisance to his private interest!