n the summer of 1665, the Great Plague appeared in the midst of the alarm over the Dutch invasion. The three earlier visitations of the terrible disease during Milton’s youth were to be eclipsed in horror by this, the last great one that England was to know. Little connection between dirt and disease existed in the minds of even scientific men. Dirt was condemned as unæsthetic; but that earth floors covered with rushes, mixed with greasy bones and decaying cabbage leaves, had any connection with the griping pain of the groaning child upon the cot, its father did not dream. Some water was brought in pipes from Tyburn, but much of it was taken from the polluted Thames near London Bridge and carried about the streets in water-carts. How much was taken for bathing purposes may be imagined. When a luxurious monarch like Louis XIV. found a bath no necessity, we need not wonder that the English cartman, and blacksmith, and craftsman, housed in his narrow tenements near Smithfield or in Southwark, considered it a superfluity.

The summer of 1665 was hot and oppressive. All through the pitiless heat the wretched inmates of the town, whence two hundred thousand of the fortunate ones like Milton had fled, walked around the gloomy and deserted streets gathering their dead. By September fifteen hundred were dying every day. The heat was aggravated by the bonfires which were kept burning in vain hope of purifying the atmosphere. Physicians, ignorant, but heroic, remained at their posts, cupping and blistering, and uselessly tormenting the helpless folk who with pathetic confidence looked to them for salvation. Some men became insane, and some died of sheer fright. The suddenness of the death was one of the most ghastly features of the scourge. The mother who nursed her child at morning handed its little corpse at night to the man with the bell and dreadful cart, and knew not where its tender limbs were rudely thrust with the haste of a great terror which possessed the wretched gravediggers.

Out of a population of less than seven hundred thousand, probably one hundred thousand perished, and starvation and poverty stared many others in the face.

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Erected in 1564-70 by Sir Thomas Gresham, and burned in the Great Fire in 1666.

From an old engraving.

Something must have been learned of the need of purer water, for we find London, after the fire next year, bestirring itself to get a general supply of water from a canal forty miles long, called “New River,” which conducted a supply from Chadswell Springs in Hertfordshire to a reservoir at Islington.

The summer of 1666 was likewise hot and dry, and a furious gale blew for weeks together. Conditions were the same as in Chicago before the conflagration that in November, 1871, swept over 1,687 acres, which covered a territory four miles long and nearly three miles wide, and entailed a loss of $300,000,000, though half of the buildings were of wood. The moment was as propitious for the fire fiend as when Mother O’Leary’s cow kicked over the lamp in the Windy City of the West. A baker’s oven took fire in Pudding Lane, two hundred and two feet from the site of the present Fire Monument, which Wren erected in memory of it that number of feet in height. The fire began on Sunday night. It was twenty-four hours before the dazed citizens attempted organised relief, but then it was too late. By Tuesday evening the flames had licked up everything as far west as the Temple. The resolute king came to the help of the inefficient mayor, and ordered gunpowder to be used to blow up buildings and thus create open spaces where the fire would lack food. By Thursday evening the fire had practically ceased, and the citizens who had looked on at the destruction of their homes and churches and shops and the inestimable treasures of the past, sought shelter for their weary limbs. No telegraphic messages of sympathy, no carloads of provisions from neighbouring cities poured in to their relief, and homeless children cried for bread.