NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 281 



LETTER LXV. 



TO THE SAME. 



THE summer of the year 1783 was an amazing and portentous 

 one, and full of horrible phaenomena ; for, besides the alarming 

 meteors and tremendous thunder-storms that affrighted and dis- 

 tressed the different counties of this kingdom, the peculiar haze, or 

 smoky fog, that prevailed for many weeks in this island, and in 

 every part of Europe, and even beyond its limits, was a most 

 extraordinary appearance, unlike anything known within the 

 memory of man. By my journal I find that I had noticed this 

 strange occurrence from June 23rd to July 2Oth inclusive, during 

 which period the wind varied to every quarter without making any 

 alteration in the air. The sun, at noon, looked as blank as a 

 clouded moon, and shed a rust-coloured ferruginous light on the 

 ground, and floors of rooms ; but was particularly lurid and blood- 

 coloured 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 fear of change 

 Perplexes monarchs ." 



