divers times above water, was judged to be longer than the largest ship
on the river; "but when she tasted the fresh water and scented the Land,
she returned into the sea." Not so fortunate was a vast whale cast upon
the Isle of Thanet, in Kent, in 1575, which was "twenty Ells long, and
thirteen foot broad from the belly to the backbone, and eleven foot
between the eyes. One of his eyes being taken out of his head was more
than a cart with six horses could draw; the Oyl being boyled out of his
head was Parmacittee." Nor the monstrous fish cast ashore in Lincolnshire
in 1564, which measured six yards between the eyes and had a tail fifteen
feet broad; "twelve men stood upright in his mouth to get the Oyl." In
1612 a comet appeared, which in the opinion of Dr. Bainbridge, the great
mathematician of Oxford, was as far above the moon as the moon is above
the earth, and the sequel of it was that infinite slaughters and
devastations followed it both in Germany and other countries. In 1613, in
Standish, in Lancashire, a maiden child was born having four legs, four
arms, and one head with two faces--the one before, the other behind, like
the picture of Janus. (One thinks of the prodigies that presaged the
birth of Glendower.) Also, the same year, in Hampshire, a carpenter,
lying in bed with his wife and a young child, "was himself and the childe
both burned to death with a sudden lightning, no fire appearing outwardly
upon him, and yet lay burning for the space of almost three days till he
was quite consumed to ashes." This year the Globe playhouse, on the
Bankside, was burned, and the year following the new playhouse, the
Fortune, in Golding Lane, "was by negligence of a candle, clean burned
down to the ground." In this year also, 1614, the town of
Stratford-on-Avon was burned. One of the strangest events, however,
happened in the first year of Elizabeth (1558), when "dyed Sir Thomas
Cheney, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, of whom it is reported for a
certain, that his pulse did beat more than three quarters of an hour
after he was dead, as strongly as if he had been still alive." In 1580 a