they were past all
admonitions. They seemed to depend upon it that the air was restored,
and that the air was like a man that had had the smallpox,--not capable
of being infected again. This revived that notion that the infection was
all in the air; that there was no such thing as contagion from the sick
people to the sound; and so strongly did this whimsey prevail among
people, that they run altogether promiscuously, sick and well. Not the
Mohammedans, who, prepossessed with the principle of predestination,
value[311] nothing of contagion, let it be in what it will, could be
more obstinate than the people of London. They that were perfectly
sound, and came out of the wholesome air, as we call it, into the city,
made nothing of going into the same houses and chambers, nay, even into
the same beds, with those that had the distemper upon them, and were not
recovered.

Some, indeed, paid for their audacious boldness with the price of their
lives. An infinite number fell sick, and the physicians had more work
than ever, only with this difference, that more of their patients
recovered, that is to say, they generally recovered; but certainly there
were more people infected and fell sick now, when there did not die
above a thousand or twelve hundred a week, than there was[312] when
there died five or six thousand a week, so entirely negligent were the
people at that time in the great and dangerous case of health and
infection, and so ill were they able to take or except[313] of the
advice of those who cautioned them for their good.

The people being thus returned, as it were, in general, it was very
strange to find, that, in their inquiring after their friends, some
whole families were so entirely swept away that there was no remembrance
of them left. Neither was anybody to be found to possess or show any
title to that little they had left; for in such cases what was to be
found was generally embezzled and purloined, some gone one way, some
another.

It was said such abandoned effects came to the King as the universal
heir; upon which we are told, and I suppose it was in part true, that
the King granted all such as deodands[314] to the lord mayor and court
of aldermen of London, to be applied to the use of the poor, of whom
there were very many. For it is to be observed, that though the
occasions of relief and the objects of distress were very many more in
the time of the violence of the plague than now, after all was over