The circumstances are so exactly the same as in 1603 that it is needless to repeat much: the sextons, coffin-makers, bearers, searchers, apothecaries and quacks are all profitably employed;
“And last to dog-killers great gain abounds,
For braining brawling curs and foisting hounds.”
The clocks striking the hours are not heard for the constant tolling of bells. “Strange,” says Holland,
“Strange that the hours should fail to tell the day
When Time to thousands ran so fast away.”
Of the sick, Taylor says there were
“Some franticke raving, some with anguish crying.”
—delirious ravings and cries of pain (from the buboes) which we know from the accounts for 1665 to have been no rhetorical exaggeration. There were the same crowded common graves as in 1603, probably in the same graveyards:
“My multitude of graves that gaping wide
Are hourly fed with carcases of men.
Those hardly swallowed, they be fed again.”
Or as Taylor says,
“Dead coarses carried and recarried still
Whilst fifty corpses scarce one grave doth fill.”