From the first page to the last the writer refers to Danes Court, near Deal, as the home of his brother, and he himself passes the intervals of his dissolute life in London in visits to his Kentish kinsman. Now Danes Court had been for centuries in the possession of the ancient family of Fogge, and I at once concluded that the writer of my diary was a younger member of the house. Indeed, encouraged therein by Hasted, the great authority on Kentish history, I went so far as to establish to my own entire satisfaction that the diarist was a certain Captain Christopher Fogge, R.N., who died in 1708, and was buried in Rochester Cathedral, and I was confirmed in this belief by the fact that the wind and weather of each day is carefully recorded as in a sailor's log-book. But somehow it did not fit in. Constant reference is made to a brother Francis, and no amount of patient investigation in county genealogies and baptismal certificates could unearth any one named Francis Fogge. So I had to hark back and try another clue. Brother Francis was evidently a clergyman and a graduate of King's College, Cambridge, and towards the end of the diary the author visits him at the village of Prescot, near Liverpool. Sure enough the rich living of Prescot was in the gift of King's College, Cambridge, and further inquiry soon showed that a certain Francis Bere, M.A., was rector from 1700 until his death in 1722. This of itself was not much, but it led to further clues which proved the monumental Hasted {348} ("History of Kent") to be hopelessly wrong about the Fogge pedigree and the ownership of Danes Court at the time, and the whole question was settled more completely than I could have hoped by the discovery, in the "Transactions of the Kent Archæological Society for 1863," of a copy of the copious memoranda in the old family Bible, written by the stout cavalier, Richard Fogge, and his son John, with the notes attached thereto by Warren, the Kentish antiquary in 1711, in which the family history is made clear. This was good as far as it went, and proved the surname and parentage of the author of the diary, but did not identify him personally. Certain references in the manuscript, however, sent me searching amongst the Treasury Papers in the Record Office, and there I found a set of papers written in the same cramped, finnicking hand as the diary, which set my mind at rest, and proved beyond doubt or question who was the methodical rake that indiscreetly confided the secret of his "goings on" to the incomplete oblivion of the Spanish tongue.