upon by all sorts of pretenders and by every mountebank. There is no
doubt but these quacking sort of fellows raised great gains out of the
miserable people, for we daily found the crowds that ran after them were
infinitely greater, and their doors were more thronged than those of Dr
Brooks, Dr Upton, Dr Hodges, Dr Berwick, or any, though the most famous
men of the time. I And I was told that some of them got five pounds a
day by their physic.

But there was still another madness beyond all this, which may serve to
give an idea of the distracted humour of the poor people at that time:
and this was their following a worse sort of deceivers than any of
these; for these petty thieves only deluded them to pick their pockets
and get their money, in which their wickedness, whatever it was, lay
chiefly on the side of the deceivers, not upon the deceived. But in this
part I am going to mention, it lay chiefly in the people deceived, or
equally in both; and this was in wearing charms, philtres, exorcisms,
amulets, and I know not what preparations, to fortify the body with them
against the plague; as if the plague was not the hand of God, but a kind
of possession of an evil spirit, and that it was to be kept off with
crossings, signs of the zodiac, papers tied up with so many knots,
and certain words or figures written on them, as particularly the word
Abracadabra, formed in triangle or pyramid, thus:--

ABRACADABRA
ABRACADABR Others had the Jesuits'
ABRACADAB mark in a cross:
ABRACADA I H
ABRACAD S.
ABRACA
ABRAC Others nothing but this
ABRA mark, thus:
ABR
AB * *
A {*}

I might spend a great deal of time in my exclamations against the
follies, and indeed the wickedness, of those things, in a time of
such danger, in a matter of such consequences as this, of a national
infection. But my memorandums of these things relate rather to take
notice only of the fact, and mention only that it was so. How the poor
people found the insufficiency of those things, and how many of them
were afterwards carried away in the dead-carts and thrown into the
common graves of every parish with these hellish charms and trumpery
hanging about their necks, remains to be spoken of as we go along.

All this was the effect of the hurry the people were in, after the first
notion of the plaque bei