be positive whether he said yet forty days or yet a few days. Another
ran about naked, except a pair of drawers about his waist, crying day
and night, like a man that Josephus mentions, who cried, ‘Woe to
Jerusalem!’ a little before the destruction of that city. So this poor
naked creature cried, ‘Oh, the great and the dreadful God!’ and said no
more, but repeated those words continually, with a voice and
countenance full of horror, a swift pace; and nobody could ever find
him to stop or rest, or take any sustenance, at least that ever I could
hear of. I met this poor creature several times in the streets, and
would have spoken to him, but he would not enter into speech with
me or any one else, but held on his dismal cries continually.
These things terrified the people to the last degree, and especially
when two or three times, as I have mentioned already, they found one
or two in the bills dead of the plague at St Giles’s.
Next to these public things were the dreams of old women, or, I
should say, the interpretation of old women upon other people’s
dreams; and these put abundance of people even out of their wits.
Some heard voices warning them to be gone, for that there would be
such a plague in London, so that the living would not be able to bury
the dead. Others saw apparitions in the air; and I must be allowed to
say of both, I hope without breach of charity, that they heard voices
that never spake, and saw sights that never appeared; but the
imagination of the people was really turned wayward and possessed.
And no wonder, if they who were poring continually at the clouds saw
shapes and figures, representations and appearances, which had
nothing in them but air, and vapour. Here they told us they saw a
flaming sword held in a hand coming out of a cloud, with a point
hanging directly over the city; there they saw hearses and coffins in
the air carrying to be buried; and there again, heaps of dead bodies
lying unburied, and the like, just as the imagination of the poor
terrified people furnished them with matter to work upon.
So hypochondriac fancies represent
Ships, armies, battles in the firmament;
Till steady eyes the exhalations solve,
And all to its first matter, cloud, resolve.
I could fill this account with the strange relations such people gave
every day of what they had seen; and every one was so positive of
their having seen what they pretended to see, that there was no
contradicting them without breach of friendship, or being accounted
rude and unmannerly on the one hand, and profane and impenetrable
on the other. One time before the plague was begun (otherwise than
as I have said in St Giles’s), I think it was in March, seeing a crowd of
people in the street, I joined with them to satisfy my curiosity, and
found them all staring up into the air to see what a woman told them
appeared plain to her, which was an angel clothed in white, with a
fiery sword in his hand, waving it or brandishing it over his head. She
described every part of the figure to the life, showed them the motion
and the form, and the poor people came into it so eagerly, and with so
much readiness; ‘Yes, I see it all plainly,’ says one; ‘there’s the sword
as plain as can be.’ Another saw the angel. One saw his very face, and
cried out what a glorious creature he was! One saw one thing, and
one another. I looked as earnestly as the rest, but perhaps not with so
much willingness to be imposed upon; and I said, indeed, that I could
see nothing but a white cloud, bright on one side by the shining of the
sun upon the other part. The woman endeavoured to show it me, but
could not make me confess that I saw it, which, indeed, if I had I must
have lied. But the woman, turning upon me, looked in my face, and
fancied I laughed, in which her imagination deceived her too, for I