ch
violence that the people sat still looking at one another, and seemed
quite abandoned to despair; whole streets seemed to be desolated, and
not to be shut up only, but to be emptied of their inhabitants; doors
were left open, windows stood shattering with the wind in empty houses
for want of people to shut them. In a word, people began to give up
themselves to their fears and to think that all regulations and
methods were in vain, and that there was nothing to be hoped for but
an universal desolation; and it was even in the height of this general
despair that it Pleased God to stay His hand, and to slacken the fury
of the contagion in such a manner as was even surprising, like its
beginning, and demonstrated it to be His own particular hand, and that
above, if not without the agency of means, as I shall take notice of in
its proper place.

But I must still speak of the plague as in its height, raging even to
desolation, and the people under the most dreadful consternation, even,
as I have said, to despair. It is hardly credible to what excess the
passions of men carried them in this extremity of the distemper, and
this part, I think, was as moving as the rest. What could affect a man
in his full power of reflection, and what could make deeper impressions
on the soul, than to see a man almost naked, and got out of his house,
or perhaps out of his bed, into the street, come out of Harrow Alley,
a populous conjunction or collection of alleys, courts, and passages in
the Butcher Row in Whitechappel,--I say, what could be more affecting
than to see this poor man come out into the open street, run dancing and
singing and making a thousand antic gestures, with five or six women and
children running after him, crying and calling upon him for the Lord's
sake to come back, and entreating the help of others to bring him back,
but all in vain, nobody daring to lay a hand upon him or to come near
him?

This was a most grievous and afflicting thing to me, who saw it all
from my own windows; for all this while the poor afflicted man was, as
I observed it, even then in the utmost agony of pain, having (as they
said) two swellings upon him which could not be brought to break or to
suppurate; but, by laying strong caustics on them, the surgeons had, it
seems, hopes to break them--which caustics were then upon him, burning
his flesh as with a hot iron. I cannot say what became of this poor man,
but I think he continued roving about i