w to dawn that
the vicinities of St. James's and Covent Garden were not made brilliant
by the torches of those accompanying revellers to their homes. The
fashionable hour for dinner was three of the clock, and for greater
satisfaction of guests it now became the mode to entertain them after
that meal with performances of mountebanks and musicians, Various
diaries inform us of this custom. When my Lord Arlington had bidden his
friends to a feast, he subsequently diverted them by the tricks of a
fellow who swallowed a knife in a horn sheath, together with several
pebbles, which he made rattle in his stomach, and produced again, to the
wonder and amusement of all who beheld him. [At a great dinner given by
this nobleman, Evelyn, who was present, tells us that Lord Stafford, the
unfortunate nobleman afterwards executed on Tower Hill, "rose from the
table in some disorder, because there were roses stuck about the fruite
when the descert was set on the table; such an antipathie it seems he
had to them, as once Lady St. 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