and thirty—thirty-one, the frost was excessive;
and again, nine years after that, there was a
long hard frost, never colder than ten degrees
at the lowest, but enduring for nine weeks, so
that again there were booths on the Thames.
The transactions of the Royal Society also
record that in the winter of seventeen 'fifty-three
—four, there was a day of remarkable fluctuation.
The thermometer within twenty-four hours rose
forty or fifty degrees, the cold coming as it
were by fits in an unusual manner. The lowest
degree that winter was fifteen. In seventeen
hundred and sixty-two—three, the hard frost
set in on Christmas-day, and lasted till the
twenty-ninth of January. The Thames at
London would bear carriages. Ten and a half
was the lowest degree of temperature reached
that, winter. In Cornwall, Wales, and Ireland,
the winter was unusually mild, but it was
verv sharp indeed in the north-east of Europe.
In January, seventeen 'sixty-seven, the thermometer
at Norwich fell to seven degrees. The
Rhine that year was frozen at Coblentz for
nearly four weeks following the twenty-first of
December. In the winter following, Professor
Wilson, at Glasgow, observed the thermometer
to be at two degrees below zero, and another
person, on another day that year, found it to be
one below zero at Derby.

The next of the famous frosty winters was
that of seventeen 'eighty-eight—nine, when the
lowest degree of cold was thirteen, but the frost
lasted long enough to set up a fair on the
Thames. Without mention of place, or of
observer's name, it is said in Rees's Cyclopædia,
that in January, seventeen hundred and ninety-
five, the thermometer fell to six below zero, the
only note of a degree of cold comparable to that
felt in some parts of England on last Christmas
morning. The thermometer fell to eleven
degrees in December, seventeen hundred and
ninety-eight, after which the great year of frost,
and frost fair upon the Thames, was eighteen
hundred and fourteen. Of this winter of eighteen
hundred and fourteen, records abound. The
Gentleman's Magazine reports that, in the west
of England, snow fell on the nights of the tenth
and eleventh of January to such an extent, that it
lay twelve feet deep in the middle of the road
a few miles out of Exeter, and was almost as
deep in Wales. It was as bad under the hills in
parts of Kent, from the thirteenth to the fifteenth
of January; the road from the Three Squirrels,
in Stockburn valley, to the top of Debbling hill,
was wholly impassable, the snow being in some
places sixteen feet deep. On the seventeenth,
upwards of one hundred bags of letters had not
arrived at the General Post-ollice; the roads
were stopped in all directions.

There was fog, too, in those days. "On Monday.
the third of January (1814)," says the Gentleman's
Magazine, "the density of the atmosphere
during the day, and the heavy fog at night during
the whole of last week, in London and many
miles round, has been remarkable." Coaches
were overturned, and many other accidents
happened." There has been no instance of such a
fog as last week pervaded the metropolis,
extending many miles round, since the earthquake
at Lisbon, in 1755, when this country was visited
by a fog which had not been equalled for a
century before, lasting eight days. On Saturday
afternoon, between two and four, the obscurity
was greater than it had been during the
daytime since the commencement. Yesterday,
however, the fog disappeared in consequence of
a change of wind." Just before this fog set in,
cabinet business of great importance had been
transacted, and the prime minister was lucky
enough to find his way to the Continent. But
the Prince Regent, on his way to Hatfield, on a
visit to the Marquis of Salisbury, was lost for
several hours. One of his outriders fell into a
ditch, and notwithstanding the time spent, the
progress was no further than Kentish Town,
from which place the Prince, with great
difficulty, was got back to Carlton House. Mr.
Croker, secretary to the Admiralty, struggled
to find his house in tbe western suburb, but was
obliged to put back. During the great frost the
fog seems to have been prevalent; for, on the
twenty-ninth, it is stated that the Birmingham
mail was seven hours in going from the Post-
office to Uxbridge, a distance of about twenty
miles. The short stages had two persons with
links running by the horses' heads. But though
the foot-passengers also carried links, the hackney-
coaches got upon the pavement, and confusion
was great in the streets. On the fourteenth
of February there was a tempestuous storm of
snow, and it is said that a great number of fish
called "golden maids" were picked up at Brighton
and sold at a good price. They floated to
shore blind, and they were blinded, men said, by
the snowstorm. On the twentieth of January,
in consequence of the great accumulation of
snow in London and the necessity of throwing
it from roofs, the carriage-ways in the middle
of the streets were scarcely passable, and the
streams constantly flowing from the open plugs
added to the frozen heap. In another day or
two, and for some time afterwards, the ice
on the Serpentine supported mountains of
snow which sweepers had collected there. At
this time, vast masses of floating ice were
on the Thames, and these being generally
heaped with snow, formed sometimes great bergs,
cracking and grinding against each other with a
loud noise. Sometimes those icebergs rose one
over another covered with foam, and were
violently impelled by the wind and water, with
wild crashing, through the arches of the bridge.
The chief rivers of England were frozen over,
and, on the fourteenth January, the snow in
Dublin lay to a greater depth than had been
known for half a century. In the narrow
streets, after the pathways had been in some
measure cleared, the snow was more than six
feet in depth. In various parts of Ireland vast
numbers of persons died of cold and hunger.
The coldest days were the ninth, thirteenth,
and fifteenth of January; on the ninth, the
thermometer fell to its iowest point, of three
degrees. There were five days in that January