really did not laugh, but was very seriously reflecting how the poor
people were terrified by the force of their own imagination. However,
she turned from me, called me profane fellow, and a scoffer; told me
that it was a time of God’s anger, and dreadful judgements were
approaching, and that despisers such as I should wander and perish.
The people about her seemed disgusted as well as she; and I found
there was no persuading them that I did not laugh at them, and that
I should be rather mobbed by them than be able to undeceive them.
So I left them; and this appearance passed for as real as the
blazing star itself.
Another encounter I had in the open day also; and this was in going
through a narrow passage from Petty France into Bishopsgate
Churchyard, by a row of alms-houses. There are two churchyards to
Bishopsgate church or parish; one we go over to pass from the place
called Petty France into Bishopsgate Street, coming out just by the
church door; the other is on the side of the narrow passage where the
alms-houses are on the left; and a dwarf-wall with a palisado on it on
the right hand, and the city wall on the other side more to the right.
In this narrow passage stands a man looking through between the
palisadoes into the burying-place, and as many people as the
narrowness of the passage would admit to stop, without hindering the
passage of others, and he was talking mightily eagerly to them, and
pointing now to one place, then to another, and affirming that he saw
a ghost walking upon such a gravestone there. He described the
shape, the posture, and the movement of it so exactly that it was the
greatest matter of amazement to him in the world that everybody did
not see it as well as he. On a sudden he would cry, ‘There it is; now it
comes this way.’ Then, ‘Tis turned back’; till at length he persuaded the
people into so firm a belief of it, that one fancied he saw it, and
another fancied he saw it; and thus he came every day making a
strange hubbub, considering it was in so narrow a passage, till
Bishopsgate clock struck eleven, and then the ghost would seem to
start, and, as if he were called away, disappeared on a sudden.
I looked earnestly every way, and at the very moment that this man
directed, but could not see the least appearance of anything; but so
positive was this poor man, that he gave the people the vapours in
abundance, and sent them away trembling and frighted, till at length
few people that knew of it cared to go through that passage, and
hardly anybody by night on any account whatever.
This ghost, as the poor man affirmed, made signs to the houses, and
to the ground, and to the people, plainly intimating, or else they so
understanding it, that abundance of the people should come to be
buried in that churchyard, as indeed happened; but that he saw such
aspects I must acknowledge I never believed, nor could I see anything
of it myself, though I looked most earnestly to see it, if possible.
These things serve to show how far the people were really overcome
with delusions; and as they had a notion of the approach of a
visitation, all their predictions ran upon a most dreadful plague, which
should lay the whole city, and even the kingdom, waste, and should
destroy almost all the nation, both man and beast.
To this, as I said before, the astrologers added stories of the
conjunctions of planets in a malignant manner and with a mischievous
influence, one of which conjunctions was to happen, and did happen,
in October, and the other in November; and they filled the people’s
heads with predictions on these signs of the heavens, intimating that
those conjunctions foretold drought, famine, and pestilence. In the
two first of them, however, they were entirely mistaken, for we had no
droughty season, but in the beginning of the year a hard frost, which
lasted from December almost to March, and after that moderate