d with the stings of those
unpleasing imaginations that assault me, whilst I am arming myself to
drive them away, or at least to wrestle with them.

But behold another aggravation of the evil which befell me in the tail of
the rest: both without doors and within I was assailed with a most
violent plague, violent in comparison of all others; for as sound bodies
are subject to more grievous maladies, forasmuch as they, are not to be
forced but by such, so my very healthful air, where no contagion, however
near, in the memory of man, ever took footing, coming to be corrupted,
produced strange effects:

"Mista senum et juvenum densentur funera; nullum
Saeva caput Proserpina fugit;"

["Old and young die in mixed heaps. Cruel Proserpine forbears
none."--Horace, Od., i. 28, 19.]

I had to suffer this pleasant condition, that the sight of my house, was
frightful to me; whatever I had there was without guard, and left to the
mercy of any one who wished to take it. I myself, who am so hospitable,
was in very great distress for a retreat for my family; a distracted
family, frightful both to its friends and itself, and filling every place
with horror where it attempted to settle, having to shift its abode so
soon as any one's finger began but to ache; all diseases are then
concluded to be the plague, and people do not stay to examine whether
they are so or no. And the mischief on't is that, according to the rules
of art, in every danger that a man comes near, he must undergo a
quarantine in fear of the evil, your imagination all the while tormenting
you at pleasure, and turning even your health itself into a fever. Yet
all this would have much less affected me had I not withal been compelled
to be sensible of the sufferings of others, and miserably to serve six
months together for a guide to this caravan; for I carry my own antidotes
within myself, which are resolution and patience. Apprehension, which is
particularly feared in this disease, does not much trouble me; and, if
being alone, I should have been taken, it had been a less cheerless and
more remote departure; 'tis a kind of death that I do not think of the
worst sort; 'tis commonly short, stupid, without pain, and consoled by
the public condition; without ceremony, without mourning, without a
crowd. But as to the people about us, the hundredth part of them could
not be saved:

"Videas desertaque regna
Pa