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 bills 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 the plague was begun, otherwise than as I have said in
St. Giles's (I think it was in March), seeing a crowd of people in the
street, I joined with them to satisfy my curiosity, and found them all
staring up into the air to see what a woman told them appeared plain to
her, which was an angel clothed in white, with a fiery sword in his
hand, waving it or brandishing it over his head. She described every
part of the figure to the life, showed them the motion and the form, and
the poor people came into it so eagerly and with so much readiness.
"Yes, I see it all plainly," says one: "there's