IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 17 



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 accus- 

 tomed 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 of ashes and the indestructible 

 energy of the people were all that remained of the glory 

 of five-sixths of the city within the walls. 



Our forefathers had their own ways of accounting for 

 each of these calamities. They submitted to the plague 

 in humility and in penitence, for they believed it to be 

 the judgment of God. But, towards the fire they were 

 furiously indignant, interpreting it as the effect of the 

 malice of man, as the work of the Republicans, or of 

 the Papists, according as their prepossessions ran in 

 favour of loyalty or of Puritanism. 



It would, I fancy, have fared but ill with one who, 

 standing where I now stand, in what was then a thickly- 

 peopled and fashionable part of London, should have 

 broached to our ancestors the doctrine which I now 

 propound to you that all their hypotheses were alike 

 wrong; that the plague was no more, in their sense, 



