[1202] Of the six plague-deaths in 1664, three were in Whitechapel parish, and one each in Aldgate, Cripplegate and St Giles’s-in-the-Fields.
[1203] Reliquiae Baxterianae. London, 1696, I. 448. This entry in his journal is dated September 28, 1665, at Hampden, Bucks.
[1204] Ed. cit. Chap. XIV. p. 131:—“Diseases which seem to be nearest like its (plague’s) nature; which chiefly are fevers, called pestilent and malignant; for ’tis commonly noted that fevers sometimes reign popularly, which for the vehemency of symptoms, the great slaughter of the sick, and the great force of contagion, scarce give place to the pestilence; which, however, because they imitate the type of putrid fevers, and do not so certainly kill the sick as the plague, or so certainly infect others, they deserve the name, not of the plague, but by a more minute appellation of a pestilential fever.”
[1205] In a letter from London, 9 May, 1637 (Gawdy MSS. at Norwich, Hist. MSS. Commis. X. pt. 2. p. 163) it is said: “There is a strange opinion here amongst the poorer sort of people, who hold it a matter of conscience to visit their neighbours in any sickness, yea though they know it to be the infection.”
[1206] Evans, in preface to 1721 edition of Vincent’s book.
[1207] Cal. State Papers.
[1208] Ibid.
[1209] Evans, l. c.
[1210] Reliquiae Baxterianae. London, 1696, II. 1. 2.
[1211] Milton, with his wife and daughters, spent the summer and autumn in the same quiet neighbourhood, at Chalfont St Giles, in a cottage which Ellwood had secured for him, still remaining with its low ceilings and diamond window-panes. He there showed Ellwood the manuscript of Paradise Lost, which was published in 1667. The poem contains no reference to the plague, unless, indeed, the flight to the country had given point to the lines in the 9th book: