Imatges de pàgina
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for the citizens, who now, in addition to other demonstrations of joy, erected four triumphal arches the first in Leadenhall-street, representing his majesty's arrival, the second in Cornhill, forming a naval representation, the third in Cheapside, in honour of Concord, and the fourth in Fleet-street, symbolical of Plenty.

The old national amusements were revived in London on the restoration. May-day and Christmas resumed their former appearance. The May-pole in the Strand was erected in 1661. The theatres were re-opened, pouring forth a flood of licentiousness. The love of show and decoration was cherished afresh. Dresses and equipages shone in more than their ancient splendour. In 1661, it was thought necessary to repress the gilding of coaches and chariots, because of the great waste and expense of gold in their adorning.

London also witnessed other accompaniments of the restoration. The regicide trials took place soon after the king's return, and could not fail deeply to interest, in one way or the other, the mass of the citizens, many of them personally acquainted with the parties, and perhaps abettors of the acts for which they were now arraigned. Charing Cross was the scene of the execution of Harrison, Scrope, Jones, Hugh Peters, and others. The spirit in which they met their deaths was very extraordinary. "If I had ten thousand lives," said Scrope, "I could freely and cheerfully lay them down all to witness in this matter." Jones, the night before

he died, told a friend that he had no other temptation but this, lest he should be too much transported, and carried out to neglect and slight his life, so greatly was he satisfied to die in that cause. Peters, whom Burke styles "a poor good man," said, as he was going to die, "What flesh, art thou unwilling to go to God through the fire and jaws of death? This is a good day; He is come that I have long looked for, and I shall be with him in glory;" and so he smiled when he went away. Others were executed at Tyburn, and there, too, the bodies of the protector Oliver Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw, were ignominiously exposed on a gibbet, having been dug out of their tombs in Westminster Abbey.

CHAPTER III.

THE PLAGUE YEAR IN LONDON.

TERRIFIC pestilence had often visited London, and swept into the eternal world multitudes of victims; but no calamity of this kind that ever befel our fathers can be compared with the awful visitation of the great plague year. It broke out in Drury-lane, in the month of December, 1664. For some time it had been raging in Holland, and apprehensions of its approach to the shores of our own island had for months agitated the minds of the people. Remarkable appearances in the heavens were construed into Divine warnings of some impend

ing catastrophe; and the common belief in astrology led many, in the excited state of feeling, to listen to the prognostications that issued from the press, in almanacs and other publications of the day. Defoe, in his remarkable history of the plague, which, though in its form fictitious, is doubtless in substance a credible narrative, describes a man who, like Jonah, went through the streets, crying, " Yet forty days, and London shall be destroyed." Another ran about, having only some slight clothing round his waist, exclaiming, with a voice and countenance full of horror, "Oh, the great and dreadful God!" Yet the forebodings which were excited by reports from the continent, the traditions of former visitations of pestilences, the actual breaking out of the disease in a few instances, together with the superstitious aggravations just noticed, only shadowed forth, in light pale hues, the dark and intensely gloomy colours of the desolating providence which the sovereign Ruler of all events brought over the city of London. Head-ache, fever, a burning in the stomach, dimness of sight, and livid spots on the chest, were symptoms of the fatal disorder. These signs became more numerous as the months of the year 1665 advanced; yet the cases of plague were comparatively few till the month of June. "June the 7th," says an observant writer of that period in his diary, "the hottest day that ever I felt in my life. This day, much against my will, I did see in Drury-lane two or three houses

marked with a red cross upon the doors, and 'Lord, have mercy upon us!' writ there, which was a sad sight to me, being the first of that kind that to my remembrance I ever saw." Again, on the 17th of June: "It struck me very deep this afternoon, going with a hackney coach down Holborn from the lord treasurer's, the coachman I found to drive easily, and easily, at last stood still, and came down hardly able to stand, and told me he was suddenly struck very sick, and almost blind he could not see; so I light, and went into another coach, with a sad heart for the poor man, and myself also, lest he should have been struck with the plague." This description of the first sight of the marked door, and the coach going more and more easily till it stood still, with its plague-struck driver, places the reader in the midst of the scene of disease and sorrow, awakening sympathetic emotions with those sufferers in a now distant age. The alarm increased as the deaths multiplied, and people began to pack up and leave London with all possible haste. The court and the nobility removed to a distance, and so also did vast numbers beside who had the means of doing so, and were not confined by business; yet the general terror was so great throughout the kingdom, that friends were sometimes far from being welcomed by those whom they visited. "It is scarcely possible," says Baxter, "for people who live in a time of health and security to apprehend the dreadful nature of that pestilence. How fearful people

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were thirty or forty, if not a hundred miles from London, of anything they brought from mercers' or drapers' shops, or of goods that were brought to them, or of any persons who came to their houses. How they would shut their doors against their friends; and if a man passed over the fields, how one would avoid another, as we did in the times of the wars; how every man was a terror to another. Oh, how sinfully unthankful are we for our quiet societies, habitations, and health !" bulk of the people, of course, were compelled to remain in the city, and, pent up in dirty, close, unventilated habitations, while the weather was burning hot, were exposed to the unmitigated fury of the contagion. The weekly bills of mortality rose from hundreds to thousands, till, in the month of September, the disease reached its height, and no less than ten thousand souls were hurried into eternity. The operations of business were of course checked, and in many cases entirely suspended by the terrific progress of the calamity. Several shops were closed in every street; dwellings were often left empty, the inmates having been smitten or driven away by the fatal scourge. Some of the public thoroughfares were nearly deserted. The markets being removed beyond the city walls, to prevent the people as much as possible from coming together in masses; the erection of houses also being unnecessary, and therefore discontinued for a while-carts and wagons, laden with provision, or with

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