“As one who long in populous city pent,
Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air,
Forth issuing on a summer’s morn, to breathe
Among the pleasant villages and farms,”—
An opportunity arises in the 12th book, where the Plagues of Egypt come into the prophetic vision of events after the Fall; but the movement is too rapid to allow of delay, and we have no more than—
“Botches and blains must all his flesh emboss,
And all his people.”
Gibbon thought that the comet of 1664 (which was generally remarked upon as a portent of the plague that followed) might have suggested the lines, II. 708-11
“and like a comet burn’d,
That fires the length of Ophiuchus huge
In the arctic sky, and from his horrid hair
Shakes pestilence and war.”
Gibbon seems to make a slip in taking these as “the famous lines which startled the licenser;” those are usually taken to have been I. 598-9, the figure of the sun’s eclipse, which
“with fear of change
Perplexes monarchs.”
[1212] Brit. Mus. Addit. MS. 4376 (8). “Abstract of several orders relating to the Plague,” from 35 Hen. VIII. to 1665.
[1213] In excavating the foundations of the Broad Street terminus of the North London Railway, the workmen came upon a stratum four feet below the surface and descending eight or ten feet lower, which was full of uncoffined skeletons. Some hundreds of them were collected and re-interred. (Notes and Queries, 3rd Ser. IV. 85.) The ground was part of the old enclosure of Bethlem Hospital (St Mary’s Spital outside Bishopsgate), and was acquired for a cemetery, to the extent of an acre, by Sir Thomas Roe, in 1569. Probably there were plague-pits dug in it during more than one of the great epidemics, from 1593 to 1665.
[1214] Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 1665, p. 579.