OF SELBOENE. 311 



prevailed for many weeks in this island, and in every part 

 of Europe, and even beyond its limits, was a most extra- 

 ordinary appearance, unlike any thing known within the 

 memory of man. By my journal I find that ,1 had noticed 

 this strange occurrence from June 23 to July 20 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 super- 

 stitious 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 earthquakes; 

 and about that juncture a volcano sprung 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, fre- 

 quently occurred to my mind ; and it is indeed particularly 

 applicable, because, towards the end, it alludes to a super- 

 stitious 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." 



over the leaves below them, which he previously cleaned from honeydew. 

 The result, as he anticipated, was, that the paper was soon covered with 

 honeydew, while the leaves below it were free. Ep. 



