After the cessation of the Black Plague, a greater fertility in women was everywhere remarkable—a grand phenomenon, which, from its occurrence after every destructive pestilence, proves to conviction, if any occurrence can do so, the prevalence of a higher power in the direction of general organic life. Marriages were, almost without exception, prolific; and double and treble births were more frequent than at other times; under which head, we should remember the strange remark, that after the “great mortality” the children were said to have got fewer teeth than before; at which, contemporaries were mightily shocked, and even later writers have felt surprise.
If we examine the grounds of this oft-repeated assertion, we shall find that they were astonished, to see children cut twenty, or at most, twenty-two teeth, under the supposition that a greater number had formerly fallen to their share.[106] Some writers of authority, as, for example, the physician Savonarola,[107] at Ferrara, who probably looked for twenty-eight teeth in children, published their opinions on this subject. Others copied from them, without seeing for themselves, as often happens in other matters which are equally evident; and thus the world believed in the miracle of an imperfection in the human body which had been caused by the Black Plague.
The people gradually consoled themselves after the sufferings which they had undergone; the dead were lamented and forgotten; and in the stirring vicissitudes of existence, the world belonged to the living.[108]
CHAPTER V.
Moral Effects.
The mental shock sustained by all nations during the prevalence of the Black Plague, is without parallel and beyond description. In the eyes of the timorous, danger was the certain harbinger of death; many fell victims to fear, on the first appearance of the distemper,[109] and the most stout hearted lost their confidence. Thus, after reliance on the future had died away, the spiritual union which binds man to his family and his fellow creatures, was gradually dissolved. The pious closed their accounts with the world,—eternity presented itself to their view,—their only remaining desire, was for a participation in the consolations of religion, because to them death was disarmed of its sting.
Repentance seized the transgressor, admonishing him to consecrate his remaining hours to the exercise of Christian virtues. All minds were directed to the contemplation of futurity; and children, who manifest the more elevated feelings of the soul without alloy, were frequently seen, while labouring under the plague, breathing out their spirit with prayer and songs of thanksgiving.[110]