exhausted, as the patronage of it has declined. St. Valentine and his observances will always, however, be a pretty tradition. With him the dead winter passes away, and the new life of another year comes in.
FROSTS ON THE THAMES.
A hundred years hence people will be comparing notes with the calamitous winter of 1860-61, just as we have been doing during the last few weeks with such scraps and fragments of description as have come down to us about the famous frosts, and tempests, and fogs, that visited this stupendous London of ours ages upon ages ago. But they will find us of the nineteenth century intolerably tame, when they contrast us with the ancients who flourished before the Revolution. They will learn that there was a frost in England which began shortly before Christmas, 1860, and lasted on and off pretty nearly a fortnight into January; that the thermometer presented extraordinary variations in different localities, as thermometers will do according to the manner and place in which they are hung, falling in one apochryphal spot, if the reporter is to be trusted, which I am confident he is not, down to 15° below zero; that at Hamburgh, where the birds were frozen on the trees, it was several degrees lower; that in some bleak parts of Lancashire, and elsewhere, the legs of waterfowl were frozen into the ice on the surface of lakes and ponds; that the ice on the Serpentine in Hyde Park was thirteen inches thick; that myriads of persons skated on it, night after night, by torch-light; and that at the moment when the enterprising public were on the point of inaugurating a Frost Fair, the wind shifted, and put an end to the fun.
What is all this in comparison with the mighty current of the Thames congealed from bank to bank, and the traffic and uproar of the streets, even to the tramp of Flemish horses, the amusements of the court, and the pastimes of the people, from cards and dancing to archery, football, and ninepins, transferred to the highway of the river? I must allow that it was a sight to see the skaters by torch-light upon the Serpentine. The tossing of the flambeaux through the darkness, and the glancing and leaping of links hither and thither, the hands that held them being invisible, had a lurid effect much like a revel in Pandemonium, as such scenes are represented to us by our Christmas poets. The brisk trade that was carried on in torches helped out the illusion, by suggesting to the pedestrian a momentary apprehension that he had wandered in his sleep into the infernal regions, his ears being eternally smitten with sharp cries of “Who’ll buy a torch?” “A torch for two-pence!” while his eyes were exposed to the imminent danger of “total eclipse,” the said torch being incessantly flashed into his face, partly in a spirit of elvish frolic, and partly in the way of business. Nor should the scattering homeward of the streams of population over the diverging tracks of the park, towards the small hours of the morning, be forgotten, illumed here and there by trails of light from brands flung upon the path, or by the alarming hilarity of some grimy Hymen, pitching his flaming torch, from time to time, into the thick of the crowd. But how insignificant such incidents appear beside the spectacle of the whole town in miniature bivouacking upon the Thames!
Mrs. Piozzi tells us that in her time a frost was reported to have shut up the river in the second or third centuries; but the first authenticated London frost took place in 1063, the year in which Harold hunted the Welsh into their fastnesses, when the Thames was frozen over for fourteen weeks. Thirty years later, under William Rufus, the Thames was again frozen, and the rivers through the country were so heavily locked in, that when the thaw came several bridges of stone and wood, and many water-mills, were carried away. The Christmas of 1281 was marked by a similar visitation, when five arches of London Bridge were swept from their foundations, and Rochester Bridge and others entirely destroyed. On this occasion a regular daily traffic was established across the ice between Westminster and Lambeth. In 1433-4, the river was frozen below bridge to Gravesend from the 24th of November to the 10th of February; and in 1506, and again in 1515, it became practicable for carriages and cattle throughout the month of January. The entry of Edward the Sixth into London, after he was proclaimed, in 1547, was marked by an intense frost; and in that nipping air, as the royal cortége passed, a fellow suddenly appeared on the summit of Paul’s steeple, and, as swift as an arrow from a bow, ran down a rope that was fixed from the top of the steeple to a ship’s anchor in Dean’s Place.
In 1564, the year in which Shakspeare was born, the Thames at Christmas presented a surface as firm as the face of a rock. The streets were nearly emptied, so universal was the rush of the out-of-door population to the frozen river. The thoroughfare through the Strand and Fleet Street, and on to Cheapside and Lombard Street, was deserted, a more novel and agreeable route having been discovered on the ice the whole way from Westminster to London Bridge. Multitudes of people played at football out in the centre of the stream; and Queen Elizabeth, happening at this time to be at her palace of Westminster, went on the river daily, attended by her lords and ladies, to shoot at marks. The pastimes of the Court, we may be assured, were not confined to a play of mere bowman’s arrows, for there were some in the royal train who saw—or affected to see—the bent bow of Love in the brows of Majesty, and his darts in her eyes:
Both her brows bent like my bow—
By her looks I do her know,
Which you call my shafts.
