families to be made even a terror to themselves : but after I have told you, as I have above, that one man being tied in his bed, and finding no other way to deliver himself, set the bed on fire with his candle, which unhappily stood within his reach, and burnt himself in his bed. And how another, by the insufferable torment he bore, danced aud sung naked in the streets, not knowing one ecstacy from another; I say, after I have mentioned these things, what can be added more? what can be said to represent the misery of these times, more lively to the reader, or to give him a perfect idea of a more complicated distress? I must acknowledge that this time was terrible, that I was sometimes at the end of all my resolutions, and that I had not the courage that I had at the beginning. As the extremity brought other people abroad, it drove me home, and except having made my voyage down to Blackwall and Greenwich, as I have related, which was an excursion, I kept afterwards very much within doors, as I had for about a fortnight before; I have said already, that I repented several times that I had ventured to stay in town, and had not gone away with my brother and his family, but it was too late for that now; and after I had retreated and stayed within doors a good while before my impatience led me abroad, then they called me, as I have said, to an ugly and dangerous office, which brought me out again; but as that was expired, while the height of the distemper lasted, I retired again, and continued close ten or twelve days more; during which many dismal spectacles represented themselves in my view, out of my own windows, and in our own street, as that particularly from Harrow-alley, of the poor outrageous creature which danced and sung in his agony, and many others there were: scarce a day or night passed over, but some dismal thing or other happened at the end of that Harrow-alley, which was a place full of poor people, most of them belonging to the butchers, or to employments depending upon the butchery. Sometimes heaps and throngs of people would burst out of the alley, most of them women, making a dreadful clamour, mixed or compounded of screeches, cryings, and calling one another, that we could not conceive what to make of it; almost all the dead part of the night the deadcart stood at the end of that alley, for if it went in it could not well turn again, and could go in but a little way. There, I say, it stood to receive dead bodies, and as the church-yard was but a little way off, if it went away full it would soon be back again: it is impossible to describe the most horrible cries and noise the poor people would make at their bringing the dead bodies of their children and friends out to the cart, and by the number one would have thought there had been none left behind, or that there were people enough for a small city living in those places several times they cried murder, sometimes fire but it was easy to perceive it was all distraction, and the complaints of distressed and distempered people. I believe it was every where thus at that time, for the Plague raged for six or seven weeks beyond all that I have expressed; and came even to such a height, that in the extremity, they began to break into that excellent order, of which I have spoken so much, in behalf of the ma gistrates, namely, that no dead bodies were seen in the streets, or burials in the day time, for there was a necessity, in this extremity, to bear with its being otherwise for a little while. One thing I cannot omit here, and indeed I thought it was extraordinary; at least, it seemed a remarkable hand of divine justice, viz. that all the predictors, astrologers, fortune-tellers, and what they called cunning men, conjurors, and the like; calculators of nativities, and dreamers of dreams, and such people, were gone and vanished, not one of them was to be found: I am verily persuaded that a great number of them fell in the heat of the calamity, having ventured to stay upon the prospect of getting great estates; and indeed their gain was but too great for a time, through the madness and folly of the people; but now they were silent, many of them went to their long home, not able to foretel their own fate, or to calculate their own nativities; some have been critical enough to say, that every one of them died: I dare not affirm that; but this I must own, that I never heard of one of them that ever appeared after the calamity was over. But to return to my particular observations, during this dreadful part of the visitation: I am now come, as I have said, to the month of September, which was the most dreadful of its kind, I believe that ever London saw; for by all the accounts which I have seen of the preceding visitations which have been in London, nothing has been like it; the number in the weekly bill amounting to almost 40,000 from the 22nd of August to the 26th of September, being but five weeks, the particulars of the bills are as follows, viz. From August the 22d to the 29th 7496 To the 12th To the 19th To the 26th 8252 . This was a prodigious number of itself, but if I should add the reasons which I have to believe that this account was deficient, and how deficient it was, you would with me, make no scruple to believe that there died above ten thousand a week for all those weeks, one week with another, and a proportion for several weeks both before and after: the confusion among the people, especially within the city at that time, was inexpressible; the terror was so great at last, that the courage of the people appointed to carry away the dead, began to fail them; nay, several of them died, although they had the distemper before, and were recovered; and some of them dropped down when they have been carrying the bodies even at the pitside, and just ready to throw them in; and this confusion was greater in the city, because they had flattered themselves with hopes of escaping; and thought the bitterness of death was past; one cart they told us, going up Shoreditch, was forsaken of the drivers, or being left to one man to drive, he died in the street, and the horses going on, overthrew the cart, and left the bodies, some thrown out here, some there, in a dismal manner; another cart was it seems found in the great pit in Finsbury fields, the driver being dead, or having been gone and abandoned it, and the horses running too near it, the cart fell in and drew the horses in also: it was suggested that the driver was thrown in with it, and that the cart fell upon him, by reason his whip was seen to be in the pit among the bodies; but that, I suppose, could not be certain. In our parish of Aldgate, the dead carts were several times, as I have heard, found standing at the church-yard gate, full of dead bodies, but neither bellman or driver, or any one else with it; neither in these, or many other cases, did they know what bodies they had in their cart, for sometimes they were let down with ropes out of balconies and out of windows; and sometimes the bearers brought them to the cart, sometimes other people; nor, as the men themselves said, did they trouble themselves to keep any account of the numbers. The vigilance of the magistrate was now put to the utmost trial, and it must be confessed, can never be enough acknowledged on this occasion also, whatever expence or trouble they were at, two things were never neglected in the city or suburbs either : First. Provisions were always to be had in full plenty, and the price not much raised, neither, hardly worth speaking. Second. No dead bodies lay unburied or uncovered; and if one walked from one end of the city to another, no funeral, or sign of it was to be seen in the day time, except a little, as I have said above, in the three first weeks in September. This last article perhaps will hardly be believed, when some accounts which others have published since that shall be seen, wherein they say that the dead lay unburied, which I am a s |