violence in St. Giles’s, and that the people were dying in great
numbers. This soon turned out to be awfully true. The roads out
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of London were choked up by people endeavouring to escape from the
infected city, and large sums were paid for any kind of conveyance.
The disease soon spread so fast, that it was necessary to shut up
the houses in which sick people were, and to cut them off from
communication with the living. Every one of these houses was
marked on the outside of the door with a red cross, and the words,
Lord, have mercy upon us! The streets were all deserted, grass
grew in the public ways, and there was a dreadful silence in the
air. When night came on, dismal rumblings used to be heard, and
these were the wheels of the death-carts, attended by men with
veiled faces and holding cloths to their mouths, who rang doleful
bells and cried in a loud and solemn voice, ‘Bring out your dead!’
The corpses put into these carts were buried by torchlight in great
pits; no service being performed over them; all men being afraid to
stay for a moment on the brink of the ghastly graves. In the
general fear, children ran away from their parents, and parents
from their children. Some who were taken ill, died alone, and
without any help. Some were stabbed or strangled by hired nurses
who robbed them of all their money, and stole the very beds on
which they lay. Some went mad, dropped from the windows, ran
through the streets, and in their pain and frenzy flung themselves
into the river.
These were not all the horrors of the time. The wicked and
dissolute, in wild desperation, sat in the taverns singing roaring
songs, and were stricken as they drank, and went out and died. The
fearful and superstitious persuaded themselves that they saw
supernatural sights – burning swords in the sky, gigantic arms and
darts. Others pretended that at nights vast crowds of ghosts
walked round and round the dismal pits. One madman, naked, and
carrying a brazier full of burning coals upon his head, stalked
through the streets, crying out that he was a Prophet, commissioned
to denounce the vengeance of the Lord on wicked London. Another
always went to and fro, exclaiming, ‘Yet forty days, and London
shall be destroyed!’ A third awoke the echoes in the dismal
streets, by night and by day, and made the blood of the sick run
cold, by calling out incessantly, in a deep hoarse voice, ‘O, the
great and dreadful God!’
Through the months of July and August and September, the Great
Plague raged more and more. Great fires were lighted in the
streets, in the hope of stopping the infection; but there was a
plague of rain too, and it beat the fires out. At last, the winds
which usually arise at that time of the year which is called the
equinox, when day and night are of equal length all over the world,
began to blow, and to purify the wretched town. The deaths began
to decrease, the red crosses slowly to disappear, the fugitives to
return, the shops to open, pale frightened faces to be seen in the
streets. The Plague had been in every part of England, but in
close and unwholesome London it had killed one hundred thousand
people.
All this time, the Merry Monarch was as merry as ever, and as
worthless as ever. All this time, the debauched lords and
gentlemen and the shameless ladies danced and gamed and drank, and
loved and hated one another, according to their merry ways.
So little humanity did the government learn from the late
affliction, that one of the first things the Parliament did when it
met at Oxford (being as yet afraid to come to London), was to make
a law, called the Five Mile Act, expressly directed against those
poor ministers who, in the time of the Plague, had manfully come
back to comfort the unhappy people. This infamous law, by
forbidding them to teach in any school, or to come within five