The meetings of the Royal Society were held at Gresham College in Bishopsgate Street, and then at Arundel House in the Strand, which was lent to the Society by Henry Howard of Norfolk, afterwards Duke of Norfolk. Cosmo of Tuscany visited the latter place for a meeting of the Royal Society, and he gives in his _Travels_ an interesting account of the manner in which the proceedings were carried out. There are many references in Pepys's _Diary_ to the Lord Mayor and the Rulers of the City, and of the customs carried out there. The Lord Mayor, aldermen, and common councilmen visited Cosmo, who was staying at Lord St. Alban's mansion in St. James's Square. His Highness, having dined with the King at the Duke of Buckingham's, kept the city magnates waiting for a time, but Colonel Gascoyne, "to make the delay less tedious, had accommodated himself to the national taste by ordering liquor and amusing them with drinking toasts, till it was announced that His Highness was ready to give them audience." The description of the audience is very interesting. Pepys lived in the city at the Navy Office in Seething Lane (opposite St. Olave's, Hart Street, the church he attended) during the whole of the time he was writing his _Diary_, but when he was Secretary of the Admiralty he went, in 1684, to live at the end of Buckingham Street, Strand, in a house on the east side which looks on to the river. Mr. John Eliot Hodgkin possesses the original lease (dated September 30th, 1687) from the governor and company of the New River for a supply of water through a half-inch pipe, and four small cocks of brass led from the main pipe in Villiers Street to Samuel Pepys's house in York Buildings, also a receipt for two quarters' rent for the same.[8] Two of the greatest calamities that could overtake any city occurred in London during the writing of the _Diary_, and were fully described by Pepys--viz., the Plague of 1665 and the Fire of 1666. Defoe's most interesting history of the plague year was written in 1722 at second hand, for the writer was only two years old when this scourge overran London. Pepys wrote of what he saw, and as he stuck to his duty during the whole time that the pestilence continued, he saw much that occurred.