NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 285 



at rising and setting. All the time the heat was so intense that 

 butchers' meat could hardly be eaten on the day after it was 

 killed; and the flies swarmed so in the lanes and hedges that they 

 rendered the horses half frantic, and riding irksome. The country 

 people began to look with a superstitious awe at the red, louring 

 aspect of the sun; and indeed there was reason for the most 

 enlightened person to be apprehensive; for, all the while, Calabria 

 and part of the Isle of Sicily, were torn and convulsed with earth- 

 quakes; and about that juncture a volcano sprang out of the sea 

 on the coast of Norway. On this occasion Milton's noble simile 

 of the sun, in his first book of " Paradise Lost," frequently occurred 

 to my mind; and it is indeed particularly applicable, because, 

 towards the end, it alludes to a superstitious kind of dread, with 

 which the minds of men are always impressed by such strange and 

 unusual phenomena. 



" As when the sun, new risen, 



Looks through the horizontal, misty air, 

 Shorn of his beams ; or from behind the moon, 

 In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds 

 On half the nations, and with/mr of change 

 Perplexes monarchs ." 



LETTER LXVI. 



WE are very seldom annoyed with thunderstorms : and it is no 

 less remarkable than true, that those which arise in the south have 

 hardly been known to reach this village ; for, before they get over 

 us, they take a direction to the east or to the west, or sometimes 

 divide in two, go in part to one of those quarters, and in part to 

 the other; as was truly the case in summer 1783, when, though 

 the country round was continually harassed with tempests, and 

 often from the south, yet we escaped them all, as appears by my 

 journal of that summer. The only way that I can at all account 

 for this fact for such it is is that, on that quarter, between us 

 and the sea, there are continual mountains, hill behind hill, such 



