No wonder the aspect of the city itself was frightful.The usual concourse of people in the streets,and which used to be supplied from our end of the town,was abated.The Exchange was not kept shut,indeed,but it was no more frequented.The fires were lost;they had been almost extinguished for some days by a very smart and hasty rain.But that was not all;some of the physicians insisted that they were not only no benefit,but injurious to the health of people.This they made a loud clamour about,and complained to the Lord Mayor about it.On the other hand,others of the same faculty,and eminent too,opposed them,and gave their reasons why the fires were,and must be,useful to assuage the violence of the distemper.I cannot give a full account of their arguments on both sides;only this Iremember,that they cavilled very much with one another.Some were for fires,but that they must be made of wood and not coal,and of particular sorts of wood too,such as fir in particular,or cedar,because of the strong effluvia of turpentine;others were for coal and not wood,because of the sulphur and bitumen;and others were for neither one or other.Upon the whole,the Lord Mayor ordered no more fires,and especially on this account,namely,that the plague was so fierce that they saw evidently it defied all means,and rather seemed to increase than decrease upon any application to check and abate it;and yet this amazement of the magistrates proceeded rather from want of being able to apply any means successfully than from any unwillingness either to expose themselves or undertake the care and weight of business;for,to do them justice,they neither spared their pains nor their persons.But nothing answered;the infection raged,and the people were now frighted and terrified to the last degree:so that,as Imay say,they gave themselves up,and,as I mentioned above,abandoned themselves to their despair.
But let me observe here that,when I say the people abandoned themselves to despair,I do not mean to what men call a religious despair,or a despair of their eternal state,but I mean a despair of their being able to escape the infection or to outlive the plague.which they saw was so raging and so irresistible in its force that indeed few people that were touched with it in its height,about August and September,escaped;and,which is very particular,contrary to its ordinary operation in June and July,and the beginning of August,when,as I have observed,many were infected,and continued so many days,and then went off after having had the poison in their blood a long time;but now,on the contrary,most of the people who were taken during the two last weeks in August and in the three first weeks in September,generally died in two or three days at furthest,and many the very same day they were taken;whether the dog-days,or,as our astrologers pretended to express themselves,the influence of the dog-star,had that malignant effect,or all those who had the seeds of infection before in them brought it up to a maturity at that time altogether,I know not;but this was the time when it was reported that above 3000people died in one night;and they that would have us believe they more critically observed it pretend to say that they all died within the space of two hours,viz.,between the hours of one and three in the morning.
As to the suddenness of people's dying at this time,more than before,there were innumerable instances of it,and I could name several in my neighbourhood.One family without the Bars,and not far from me,were all seemingly well on the Monday,being ten in family.That evening one maid and one apprentice were taken ill and died the next morning -when the other apprentice and two children were touched,whereof one died the same evening,and the other two on Wednesday.In a word,by Saturday at noon the master,mistress,four children,and four servants were all gone,and the house left entirely empty,except an ancient woman who came in to take charge of the goods for the master of the family's brother,who lived not far off,and who had not been sick.
Many houses were then left desolate,all the people being carried away dead,and especially in an alley farther on the same side beyond the Bars,going in at the sign of Moses and Aaron,there were several houses together which,they said,had not one person left alive in them;and some that died last in several of those houses were left a little too long before they were fetched out to be buried;the reason of which was not,as some have written very untruly,that the living were not sufficient to bury the dead,but that the mortality was so great in the yard or alley that there was nobody left to give notice to the buriers or sextons that there were any dead bodies there to be buried.
It was said,how true I know not,that some of those bodies were so much corrupted and so rotten that it was with difficulty they were carried;and as the carts could not come any nearer than to the Alley Gate in the High Street,it was so much the more difficult to bring them along;but I am not certain how many bodies were then left.Iam sure that ordinarily it was not so.
As I have mentioned how the people were brought into a condition to despair of life and abandon themselves,so this very thing had a strange effect among us for three or four weeks;that is,it made them bold and venturous:they were no more shy of one another,or restrained within doors,but went anywhere and everywhere,and began to converse.One would say to another,'I do not ask you how you are,or say how I am;it is certain we shall all go;so 'tis no matter who is all sick or who is sound';and so they ran desperately into any place or any company.