Leger also
had, and to that degree, that, as Sirr Kenelm Digby tell us,
laying but a rose upon her cheeke when she was asleepe, it raised
a blister; but Sir Kenelm was a teller of strange things."] The
master of the mint, worthy Mr. Slingsby, a man of finer taste,
delighted his guests with the performances of renowned good
masters of music, one of whom, a German, played to great
perfection on an instrument with five wire strings called the
VOIL D'AMORE; whilst my Lord Sunderland treated his visitors to a
sight of Richardson, the renowned fire eater, who was wont to
devour brimstone on glowing coals; melt a beer-glass and eat it
up; take a live coal on his tongue, on which he put a raw oyster,
and let it remain there till it gaped and was quite broiled; take
wax, pitch and sulphur, and drink them down flaming; hold a fiery
hot iron between his teeth, and throw it about like a stone from
hand to hand, and perform various other prodigious feats.
Other means of indoor amusement were practised in those
days, which seem wholly incompatible with the gravity of the
nation in these latter times. Pepys tells us that going to the
court one day he found the Duke and Duchess of York, with all the
great ladies, sitting upon a carpet on the ground playing "I love
my love with an A, because he is so-and-so; and I hate him with
an A, because of this and that;" and some of the ladies were
mighty witty, and all of them very merry. Grown persons likewise
indulged in games of blind man's buff, and amusements of a like
character; whilst at one time, the king, queen, and the whole
court falling into much extravagance, as Burnet says, "went about
masked, and came into houses unknown, and danced there with a
great deal of wild frolic.
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