THE The Story of the Great Plague. HE Angel of Destruction was abroad, and shook from his sweeping pinions the infection of the Plague. The month of June, in 1665, came in with a heat like that of a furnace. The previous spring had been remarkable for its want of moisture. The summer followed with a drought not less remarkable. The skies, day after day, were filled with the glory of the sunshine, and the flowers in the gardens and the grass in the meadows withered in the excessive heat. In the winter and spring men's minds had been disturbed by the appearance of strange meteoric phenomena; and the great comet (as Bishop Burnet says) raised the apprehensions of those who did not enter into just speculations concerning these matters. Gossipping Pepys notes in his Diary that June 7th was the hottest day he had ever felt in his life. And then he adds the words of ill omen: "This day, much against my will, I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and 'Lord, have mercy upon us' writ there; which was a sad sight for me, being the first of the kind that to my remembrance I ever saw." Not that the red cross was an unfamiliar sign to the people of London. The insanitary conditions of the crowded city, huddled between the Thames and the northern heights, and unprovided with any system of drainage, made it the happy hunting-ground of pestilence and disease. In 1636, the Plague, coming from Europe, had carried off ten thousand victims; and it continued its devastations annually down to 1647. Then there had been a cessation-an interval of comparative immunity; but in 1665 it was destined to reappear with so hideous an intensity that the memory of it lingers to this day. Ask any person to repeat the principal events of Charles II.'s reign, and it is certain that among them he will name the Great Plague. Whatever else he forgets, he will not forget that. The Destroying Angel struck down its first victim in the city in the house of Dr. Barnett, a physician, in Fenchurch Street. With laudable self-sacrifice the doctor hastened to display on his door the red cross, which, as a sign that his house was infected, immediately doomed him to solitariness and isolation, and cut him off from his neighbours and neighbourly acts of kindness. This enforced solitude, in the midst of disease and death, was a frightful punishment. George Withers, the poet, who, during the plague of 1625, had undergone it, describes it with a keen recollection of its pains : "My chamber entertained me all alone, And in the rooms adjoining lodgèd none. Yet through the darksome silent night did fly Which came, I neither knew from whence, nor whom. And oft, betwixt awaking and asleep, Their voices who did talk, or pray, or weep, Unto my list'ning ears a passage found, And troubled me by their uncertain sound." But the fell disease had appeared some time previously in what was then the suburban parish of St. Giles's-in-theFields, an Order in Council, dated April 26th, directing certain measures to be taken there for arresting its progress. These, of course, proved futile; and the contagion extended eastward. While there was yet time to escape, the rich and the idle began to hurry into the country. An evil example was set by the King and his Court, who fled from London in July, and retired to Salisbury, leaving the capital in charge of Monk Duke of Albemarle, who faced the Plague as composedly as he had faced the Dutch. Thereafter a deep despondency settled down upon the inhabitants, whose gloom was increased by the stringent restrictions imposed upon all acts of neighbourliness and good-fellowship. Business was suspended, and nearly all locomotion; trade and commerce were practically at an end. On June 21st Pepys writes: "I find all the town almost going out of town; the coaches and waggons being all full of people going into the country," where, I need hardly say, they were by no means welcome, each new-comer being regarded as a possible source of infection. "How fearful," writes Richard Baxter, "people were thirty or forty, if not an hundred, miles from London, of anything that they bought from any mercer's or draper's shop, or of any person that came to their houses! How they would shut their doors against their friend; and if a man passed over the fields, how one would avoid another, as we did in the time of wars; and how every man was a terror to another!" The selfishness latent in human nature came conspicuously to the surface under these terrible conditions. The sick were left to suffer and die unattended; even the ministers of religion, with too few exceptions, took fright at the red |