Due attention has not hitherto been paid to the competition between have-and be-perfects over a mutative verb in the post-Elizabethan writings, especially in texts which seem to reflect common and informal everyday speech. This paper is to supplement the limited number of studies that have analysed an abundant corpus and which have arrived at any statistics worthy of note, through an investigation of the rivalry between these two perfect forms in Samuel Pepys's 'Diary'. Based upon evidence

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... from Pepys's 'Diary', as well as from the thorough and enlightening studies of Friden, Kimura and Soderlind, we conclude that there is little evidence of a striking change in the perfect form of the mutative verb for nearly four centuries from Chaucerian age to the end of the 17th century. A key to answering the question of around what period the competition was settled, with have-perfect taking entire predominance over be-perfect, seems to lie in narrowing our search to the latter part of the 18th century or shortly thereafter.