ON THE ADVISABLENESS OF IMPROVING 

 NATURAL KNOWLEDGE* 



THIS time two hundred years ago in the beginning of 

 January, 1666 those of our forefathers who inhabited this 

 great and ancient city, took breath between the shocks of 

 two fearful calamities : one not quite past, although its 

 fury had abated ; the other to come. 



Within a few yards of the very spot on which we are 

 assembled, so the tradition runs, that painful and deadly 

 malady, the plague, appeared in the latter months of 1664 ; 

 and, though no new visitor, smote the people of England, 

 and especially of her capital, with a violence unknown before, 

 in the course of the following year. The hand of a master 

 has pictured what happened in those dismal months ; and 

 in that truest of fictions, The History of the Plague Year, 

 Defoe shows death, with every accompaniment of pain and 

 terror, stalking through the narrow streets of old London, 

 and changing their busy hum into a silence broken only 

 by the wailing of the mourners of fifty thousand dead ; by 

 the woful denunciations and mad prayers of fanatics ; and 

 by the madder yells of despairing profligates. 



But, about this time in 1666, the death-rate had sunk to 

 nearly its ordinary amount ; a case of plague occurred only 

 here and there, and the richer citizens who had flown from 

 the pest had returned to their dwellings. The remnant 

 of the people began to toil at the accustomed round of duty, 

 or of pleasure ; and the stream of city life bid fair to flow 

 back along its old bed, with renewed and uninterrupted 

 vigour. 



The newly kindled hope was deceitful. The great plague, 

 indeed, returned no more ; but what it had done for the 

 Londoners, the great fire, which broke out in the autumn of 

 1666, did for London ; and, in September of that year, a heap 



* A Lay Sermon delivered in St. Martin's Hall on Sunday, 

 January 7th, 1866, and subsequently published in the Fortnightly 

 Review. 



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