p. 402 _Blanket Fair._ Evelyn, 6 January, 1684, notes ‘the river quite frozen’, and on the 9th writes: ‘I went across the Thames on the ice, now become so thick as to bear not only streets of booths, in which they roasted meat, and had divers shops of wares, quite across as in a town, but coaches, carts and horses passed over.’ On subsequent days he notes the continuance of this frost, and on 24 January has a famous description of the Thames fair with its ‘sleds, sliding with skates, a bull-baiting, horse and coach-races, puppet-plays and interludes, cooks, tippling, and other lewd places, so that it seemed to be a bacchanalian triumph, or carnival on the water’. A printing press was even set up and cards printed, one of which is given, dated 5 February, in a note by Bray, _Evelyn’s Diary_, II (p. 192) (1850). p. 403 _To Henry Higden._ Henry Higden, to whose translation of Juvenal’s tenth satire Mrs. Behn prefixed these complimentary verses, was a well-known wit of the day. A Yorkshireman, a member of the Middle Temple, he moved in the best and gayest society. In 1686 he published _A Modern Essay on the Thirteenth Satyr of Juvenal_ (Licensed 11 November, 1685), and in 1687 followed this up by _A Modern Essay on the Tenth Satyr of Juvenal_. With Mrs. Behn’s Poem are also printed verses by Dryden and Settle. Higden is the author of a good comedy, _The Wary Widdow: or, Sir Noisy Parrat_ (4to, 1693). Sir Charles Sedley wrote the prologue, there are six copies (one by Tom Brown in Latin), of complimentary verses, and the play is dedicated to the Earl of Dorset and Middlesex. A legend exists that the author ‘had introduced so much punch-drinking into it that the actors got intoxicated before the end of the third act, and the house separated in confusion’. This seems to me dubious at the least, and if true the actors must have begun in a singularly mellow condition. Sir Noisy, indeed (Act i), declares ‘we must banish _Venus_ out of our Calender, Jolly _Bacchus_ shall rejoyce our hearts, and be our Dominical Letter,’ yet in Act ii, sc. iii, he toasts Clarinda’s health but once and that in ‘Wine and Colour’d water’. whilst Act iii, sc. vi, ‘_the_ Rose Tavern’ where Sir Noisy gets drunk with Scaredevil and Fulham is somewhat quiet for a toping of the period. In Act iv Nantz is quaffed on shipboard, but all the rest of the play is temperate enough, and the tradition (repeated ad nauseam), must indubitably be dismissed as pure fiction. Higden in his Preface ascribes the doom of _The Wary Widdow_ to those ‘Sons of _Zeruiah_’, the ‘murmuring _Israelites_’ and ‘Pagans of the Pits’ who ’.issing, mimicking, ridiculing, and Cat-calling’ utterly ‘vanquished the stage’, and dumbfounded the unfortunate performers. No doubt a braying clique damned the piece. It may be noted that in his Preface Higden takes occasion to gird at the recent success of Congreve’s _The Old Bachelor_.