outstrip the most magnificent of his contemporaries in the costliness of his offerings; and, perhaps, he had even already a prophetic inspiration of the happy fortune that was to crown his devotion in the following September, when “Great Eliza” conferred upon him the Earldom of Leicester, and the castle and manor of Kenilworth, where the famous revel was afterwards held. But who can look with confidence to the future from the vantage ground of present prosperity? Both favourite and frost came to violent ends: the one poisoned on a journey to that same castle in which he had himself secretly despatched two of his victims, and the other broken up suddenly into fearful inundations, upon whose rising waters houses, bridges, and vessels were borne down to the sea like the fragments of a wreck.
The winter of 1607-8 was still more severe. The frost began about the first week in December, and fluctuated on and off till the first week in January, when it set in with extraordinary rigour. At first, between the alternate freezing and thawing, and the disruption of floating masses of ice, the populace ventured only half-way across the river; but by degrees communications were opened from bank to bank opposite to Southwark and Lambeth, and then the general public took tumultuous possession. Most of the popular pastimes were at once established; and tents were set up for dancing and refreshments. Speculative tradesmen also transported their wares for sale to the crowded scene, and shoemakers and barbers pursued their avocations at temporary stands. Whether any particular kind of shoes, especially suited to the occasion, were offered for sale, does not appear; but chopines and pantofles were purchased in abundance, as gifts from city gallants to the fair ladies who ventured with them upon the ice. The barber, always popular with his gittern and lute-strings, was a centre of attraction. To have been shaved on the ice in the middle of the Thames was undoubtedly something to remember; and many an old man relieved the dull Christmas nights under the Commonwealth by relating to his grand-children how he underwent the operation, and what adventures befel him in that memorable winter. The frost lasted altogether nearly two months, the last four weeks being intense.
The allusions of Evelyn and Pepys to the state of the weather in their time are not satisfactory. “Now,” says Evelyn, under date of the 22nd January, 1649, “was the Thames frozen over with horrid tempests of wind.” Towards the end of November, 1662, there was a hard frost, which Pepys briefly dismisses by observing that “it is news to us, there having been none almost these three years.” The fact is that science had made very little advance in the investigation of meteorological phenomena. The seventeenth century was not a whit wiser in the matter of frosts and storms and shooting stars than the twelfth or thirteenth. Ignorance and superstition, on the contrary, had resolved themselves into articles of faith. Dr. Dee’s crystal was in general request, Dryden believed in astrology, and Sir Kenelm Digby dieted the exquisite Venetia upon viper wine to preserve her beauty. The weather was as great a mystery to these philosophers as it had been to the monks who tracked the course of time in their scrolls ages before. The Registers of the Grey Friars tell us, for instance, that there were great storms in 1203, when the hailstones were as big as eggs, and birds were burned on the wing; and that in 1221, during a violent tempest, fiery dragons and flying spirits were seen careering through the air.[1] The Royal Society, in the advanced era of Charles II., had meteorological marvels quite as astonishing to investigate. Amongst the problems they propounded for scientific inquiry were the cosmetic virtues of May-dew, the difference between the size of snow-flakes in Teneriffe and in England, and the productive virtue of a shower of rain which was alleged to resemble corn, and which Mr. Boyle and Mr. Evelyn, being great agricultural authorities, were requested to sow, to see what kind of crop it would yield.
It was during the frost of 1662 that skates were introduced into England from Holland. Evelyn witnessed what he describes as the wonderful and dexterous evolutions of the skaters for the first time on the 1st December. The performance took place in the presence of their majesties, on the canal which had then been recently cut in St. James’s Park. Evelyn particularly notes the swiftness of the skaters, and the suddenness with which they arrested themselves in full career upon the ice. The Thames was frozen that winter, but the watermen contrived to keep a passage open for the gentry. “I went home by water,” says Evelyn, “but not without exceeding difficulty, great flakes of ice encompassing our boat.” With the exception of a fog in August, of all months, 1663, and another which overspread the river in the December of 1671, “the thickest and darkest,” according to Evelyn, who was in the midst of it, “ever known in the memory of man,” the weather does not appear to have undergone any remarkable aberrations, till we come to the winter 1683-4.
This season was distinguished by one of the most remarkable frosts on record, there not being an hour’s intermission from the commencement of December to the 5th of February. The Thames was congealed into a solid mass of ice, eleven inches in thickness. A new city sprang into existence on the river. Streets of booths were erected, the principal of which, called “Temple Street,” crossed the stream from the Temple Stairs to Southwark. It consisted of a variety of shops, richly furnished within to attract customers, and decorated gaily on the outside with flags, and signs, selected apparently for their singularity; such as the “Broom,” and the “Whip and Egg-shell.” The vast holiday market thus put into activity acquired the nick-name of “Blanket Fair,” in consequence of the booths being formed of blankets, which, like Goldsmith’s chest of drawers, did double duty, as- ↑ The same Registers record a heavy fall of rain in 1552, which lay on the grass as red as wine. A similar phenomenon is stated, on the authority of the Profossor of Chemistry at the University of Sienna, to have occurred in that town, on the 2Sth of December last, about seven a.m., when there was a copious fall of rain of a reddish hue, which lasted for two hours, a second fall at eleven a.m., and a third at two p.m., the colour being deepest in the first. The fall was strictly local, and confined to a small quarter, the rain in the immediate neighbourhood being colourless. During the day the thermometer varied from forty-six to fifty degrees Fahrenheit.
