getty
touch is his constant anxiety to impress upon the Royalist commanders
the importance of a particular trick which he has learned abroad of
mixing foot soldiers with the cavalry. We must leave him, however, to
say a few words upon the 'History of the Plague,' which seems to come
next in merit to 'Robinson Crusoe.' Here De Foe has to deal with a story
of such intrinsically tragic interest that all his details become
affecting. It needs no commentary to interpret the meaning of the
terrible anecdotes, many of which are doubtless founded on fact. There
is the strange superstitious element brought out by the horror of the
sudden visitation. The supposed writer hesitates as to leaving the
doomed city. He is decided to stay at last by opening the Bible at
random and coming upon the text, 'He shall deliver thee from the snare
of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence.' He watches the comets:
the one which appeared before the Plague was 'of a dull, languid colour,
and its motion heavy, solemn, and slow;' the other, which preceded the
Great Fire, was 'bright and sparkling, and its motion swift and
furious.' Old women, he says, believed in them, especially 'the
hypochondriac part of the other sex,' who might, he thinks, be called
old women too. Still he half-believes himself, especially when the
second appears. He does not believe that the breath of the
plague-stricken upon a glass would leave shapes of 'dragons, snakes, and
devils, horrible to behold;' but he does believe that if they breathed
on a bird they would kill it, or 'at least make its eggs rotten.'
However, he admits that no experiments were tried. Then we have the
hideous, and sometimes horribly grotesque, incidents. There is the poor
naked creature, who runs up and down, exclaiming continually, 'Oh, the
great and the dreadful God!' but would say nothing else, and speak to no
one. There is the woman who suddenly opens a window and 'calls out,
"Death, death, death!" in a most inimitable tone, which struck me with
horror and chillness in the very blood.' There is the man who, with
death in his face, opens the door to a young apprentice sent to ask him
for money: 'Very well, child,' says the living ghost; 'go to Cripplegate
Church, and bid them ring the bell for me;' and with those words shuts
the door, goes upstairs, and dies. Then we have the horrors of the
dead-cart, and the unlucky piper who was carried off by mistake. De Foe,
with his usual ingenuity, correc