[18]
ON THE ADVISABLENESS OF IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE [19]
This time two hundred years ago--in the beginning of January,
1666--those of our forefathers who inhabited this great and ancient
city, took breath between the shocks of two fearful calamities: one not
quite past, although its fury had abated; the other to come.
Within a few yards of the very spot [20] on which we are assembled, so
the tradition runs, that painful and deadly malady, the plague, appeared
in the latter months of 1664; and, though no new visitor, smote the
people of England, and especially of her capital, with a violence
unknown before, in the course of the following year. The hand of a
master has pictured what happened in those dismal months; and in that
truest of fictions, The History of the Plague Year, Defoe [21] shows
death, with every accompaniment of pain and terror, stalking through the
narrow streets of old London, and changing their busy hum into a silence
broken only by the wailing of the mourners of fifty thousand dead; by
the woeful denunciations and mad prayers of fanatics; and by the madder
yells of despairing profligates.
But, about this time in 1666, the death-rate had sunk to nearly its
ordinary amount; a case of plague occurred only here and there, and
the richer citizens who had flown from the pest had returned to their
dwellings.
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