Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 152.djvu/746

The fire of London broke out early in the morning of Sunday, the 2nd of September 1666, in a baker’s shop in Pudding Lane, a thoroughfare running down the slope from Eastcheap to Thames Street, closely built of wooden houses coated with pitch. To Pepys, looking from a window of his house in Seething Lane, near Tower Hill, at three in the morning, the fire seemed to be no farther away than Mark Lane, the next block of buildings but one; but, being used to the deceptive appearances of fires, he went to bed again and slept until seven. He then rose and went to the Tower, from a high point of which he saw the fire raging among the houses on the near end of London Bridge, and along the water-side above and below the bridge. As no one was doing anything to stop the fire, and the strong easterly wind was spreading it into the city, he went to Whitehall and saw the king, who gave him a verbal order to the Mayor to pull down the houses around those that were burning. Later in the day he met the Mayor in Canning Street, looking “like a man spent, with a handkercher about his neck.” When Pepys gave him the king's message, he cried, like a fainting woman, “Lord! what can I do? I am spent; people will not obey me. I have been pulling down houses, but the fire overtakes us faster than we can do it.” In the course of the day the fire had spread back to Gracechurch Street and up the river to the Vintry, the river-side stores of pitch, resin, coal, and wood, wine and brandy, feeding it. All the churches were filling with goods and furniture. Canning Street, which received goods in the morning, was passing them on to Lombard Street in the afternoon. The river was crowded with barges and lighters laden with goods and furniture, among the articles of which Pepys seldom failed to notice a pair of spinets or virginals, In the midst of this throng towards evening were the king and the Duke of York in their barge at Queenhithe. Pepys made a party on the water with his wife and several friends, and landed at an alehouse on the Bankside, from which they watched the fire on the opposite Thames shore till dark—“in corners and upon steeples, and between churches and houses, as far as we could see up the hill of the city, in a most horrid, malicious, bloody flame.” “So home with a sad heart, and there find everybody discoursing and lamenting the fire; and poor Tom Hater come with some few of his goods saved out of his house, which was burned upon Fish Street Hill.” Hater and he set to work in the mild moonlight to carry things from the Navy Office into the garden, and to place the money and iron chests in the cellar. The next day, Monday, Pepys was busy removing his things, so that there are few entries in his Diary. With the aid of Admiral Sir William Penn (father of a more famous son), he buried his wine in the garden, along with his Parmesan cheese. The fire, however, did not come so far as Seething Lane, although it crept along the waterside almost to the gates of the Tower, which was only saved by