a
man that Josephus mentions, who cried, "Woe to Jerusalem!" a little
before the destruction of that city; so this poor naked creature cried,
"Oh! the great and the dreadful God!" and said no more, but repeated
those words continually, with a voice and countenance full of horror, a
swift pace; and nobody could ever find him to stop, or rest, or take any
sustenance, at least that ever I could hear of. I met this poor creature
several times in the streets, and would have spoken to him, but he would
not enter into speech with me or any one else, but kept on his dismal
cries continually.

These things terrified the people to the last degree; and especially
when two or three times, as I have mentioned already, they found one or
two in the hills, dead of the plague at St. Giles's.

Next to these public things were the dreams of old women; or I should
say, the interpretation of old women upon other people's dreams; and
these put abundance of people even out of their wits. Some heard voices
warning them to be gone, for that there would be such a plague in
London, so that the living would not be able to bury the dead; others
saw apparitions in the air; and I must be allowed to say of both, I hope
without breach of charity, that they heard voices that never spake, and
saw sights that never appeared; but the imagination of the people was
really turned wayward and possessed; and no wonder if they who were
poring continually at the clouds saw shapes and figures, representations
and appearances, which had nothing in them but air and vapor. Here they
told us they saw a flaming sword held in a hand, coming out of a cloud,
with a point hanging directly over the city. There they saw hearses and
coffins in the air carrying to be buried. And there again, heaps of dead
bodies lying unburied and the like; just as the imagination of the poor
terrified people furnished them with matter to work upon.

"So hypochondriac fancies represent
Ships, armies, battles in the firmament;
Till steady eyes the exhalations solve,
And all to its first matter, cloud, resolve."

I could fill this account with the strange relations such people give
every day of what they have seen; and every one was so positive of their
having seen what they pretended to see, that there was no contradicting
them without breach of friendship, or being accounted rude and
unmannerly on the one hand and profane and impenetrable on the other.
One time before