isited,
as of old, by devastating plagues. "As touching the pestilence," says
Sir Thomas (or rather the poet in his name), "you fancy yourselves
secure because the plague has not appeared among you for the last
hundred and fifty years--a portion of time which, long as it may seem,
compared with the brief term of mortal existence, is as nothing in the
physical history of the globe. The importation of that scourge is as
possible now as it was in former times; and were it once imported, do
you suppose it would rage with less violence among the crowded
population of your metropolis than it did before the fire? What," he
adds, "if the sweating sickness, emphatically called the English
disease, were to show itself again? Can any cause be assigned why it is
not as likely to break out in the nineteenth century as in the
fifteenth?" And, striking as the passage is, I remembered perusing it
with that incredulous feeling, natural to men in a quiet time, which
leads them to draw so broad a line between the experience of history, if
of a comparatively remote age, or of a distant place, and their own
personal experience. In the loose sense of the sophist, it was contrary
to my experience that Britain should become the seat of any such fatal
and widely-devastating disease as used to ravage it of old. And yet, now
that I saw as terrible and unwonted an infliction as either the plague
or the sweating sickness decimating our towns and villages, and the
terrible scenes described by De Foe and Patrick Walker fully rivalled,
the feeling with which I came to regard it was one, not of strangeness,
but of familiarity.

When thus unsuccessfully employed in keeping watch and ward against our
insidious enemy, the Reform Bill for Scotland passed the House of Lords,
and became the law of the land. I had watched with interest the growth
of the popular element in the country--had seen it gradually
strengthening, from the despotic times of Liverpool and Castlereagh,
through the middle period of Canning and Goderich, down till even
Wellington and Peel, men of iron as they were, had to yield to the
pressure from without, and to repeal first the Test and Corporation
Acts, and next to carry, against their own convictions, the great Roman
Catholic Emancipation measure. The people, during a season of
undisturbed peace, favourable to the growth of opinion, were becoming
more decidedly a power in the country than they had ever been before;
and of course, as