of God, but a kind of possession of an evil spirit, and that it was to be
kept off with crossings, signs of the zodiac, papers tied up with so
many knots, and certain words or figures written on them, as
particularly the word Abracadabra, formed in triangle or pyramid,
thus: –
ABRACADABRA
ABRACADABR Others had the Jesuits’
ABRACADAB mark in a cross:
ABRACADA I H
ABRACAD S.
ABRACA
ABRAC Others nothing but this
ABRA mark, thus:
ABR
AB * *
A {*}
* *
I might spend a great deal of time in my exclamations against the
follies, and indeed the wickedness, of those things, in a time of such
danger, in a matter of such consequences as this, of a national
infection. But my memorandums of these things relate rather to take
notice only of the fact, and mention only that it was so. How the poor
people found the insufficiency of those things, and how many of them
were afterwards carried away in the dead-carts and thrown into the
common graves of every parish with these hellish charms and trumpery
hanging about their necks, remains to be spoken of as we go along.
All this was the effect of the hurry the people were in, after the first
notion of the plaque being at hand was among them, and which may
be said to be from about Michaelmas 1664, but more particularly after
the two men died in St Giles’s in the beginning of December;
and again, after another alarm in February. For when the plague
evidently spread itself, they soon began to see the folly of trusting
to those unperforming creatures who had gulled them of their money;
and then their fears worked another way, namely, to amazement
and stupidity, not knowing what course to take or what to do either
to help or relieve themselves. But they ran about from one neighbour’s
house to another, and even in the streets from one door to another,
with repeated cries of, ‘Lord, have mercy upon us! What shall we do?’
Indeed, the poor people were to be pitied in one particular thing in
which they had little or no relief, and which I desire to mention with a
serious awe and reflection, which perhaps every one that reads this
may not relish; namely, that whereas death now began not, as we may
say, to hover over every one’s head only, but to look into their houses
and chambers and stare in their faces. Though there might be some
stupidity and dulness of the mind (and there was so, a great deal), yet
there was a great deal of just alarm sounded into the very inmost soul,
if I may so say, of others. Many consciences were awakened; many
hard hearts melted into tears; many a penitent confession was made of
crimes long concealed. It would wound the soul of any Christian to
have heard the dying groans of many a despairing creature, and none
durst come near to comfort them. Many a robbery, many a murder,
was then confessed aloud, and nobody surviving to record the
accounts of it. People might be heard, even into the streets as we
passed along, calling upon God for mercy through Jesus Christ, and
saying, ‘I have been a thief, ‘I have been an adulterer’, ‘I have been a
murderer’, and the like, and none durst stop to make the least inquiry
into such things or to administer comfort to the poor creatures that in
the anguish both of soul and body thus cried out. Some of the
ministers did visit the sick at first and for a little while, but it was not
to be done. It would have been present death to have gone into some
houses. The very buriers of the dead, who were the hardenedest
creatures in town, were sometimes beaten back and so terrified that
they durst not go into houses where the whole families were swept
away together, and where the circumstances were more particularly horrible,
as some were; but this was, indeed, at the first heat of the distemper.
Time inured them to it all, and they ventured everywhere afterwards
without hesitation, as I shall have occasion to mention