1-93 



^ocltct ^Imanacfes at ilentsi)atD, 



1671 — 1721. 



By Sir George Sitwell, Bart., F.S.A. 



UY a new almanack ? " was one of the street cries of 

 London in the reign of Queen Anne ; and probably 

 there was not a man who could read and write, and 

 could afford the necessary ninepence, who did not 

 furnish himself with one of these quaint little books, bound in 

 brown or red leather, and fastened with silken strings or clasps of 

 brass. From the reign of James the First to, at least, the middle 

 of the eighteenth century, a squire, a merchant, an attorney, or a 

 parson, who stirred from home without his pocket oracle, was as 

 much at sea as a mariner without a compass. If he was of a 

 merry mood, it furnished him with his daily laugh ; if of a super- 

 stitious turn, with alarming prognostications of plague, violence, 

 and signs in the sky ; if a bigot, with vehement abuse of Papists 

 and Quakers; but in any case with a guide to the main roads, a 

 list of the principal fairs, a calendar of university and law terms, 

 a chronological table from tlie creation of the world, a sketch, in 

 woodcut, of the influence of the planets upon the various members 

 of the human frame, an account of the diet and medicine suitable 

 » to the season, and a desperate guess at the weather. Throughout 

 ■ every day of its year of office it was the guide, philosopher, and 

 K friend of its owner ; and when the New Year chimes rang out the 

 H old almanacks, and rang in the new, it found a long resting-place, 

 ^^ with past generations of " British Merlins," in some corner of a 

 ^^K walnut-wood " scrutore," until such time as executors should sit in 



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