THE PLAGUE.
A frightful interruption came to these and to all other pursuits in London. In 1665, the plague, which had more than once afflicted England, broke out with fearful force in London, where the dark narrow streets with their houses meeting overhead, and the foul state of the entire town, gave every encouragement to its ravages. Pepys, who stayed in London all through the worst time of the plague, gives many a record of this visitation.[100]
‘June 7th.—The hottest day that ever I felt in my life. This day, much against my will I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors and “Lord have mercy upon us!” writ there; which was a sad sight to me, being the first of the kind that, to my remembrance, I ever saw.
‘August 16th.—To the Exchange, where I have not been a great while. But Lord! how sad a sight it is to see the streets empty of people and very few upon the ‘Change! Jealous of every door that one sees shut up lest it should be the plague, and about us two shops in three, if not more, generally shut up.
‘September 3rd (Lord’s Day).—Up; and put on my coloured silk suit very fine, and my new periwigg, bought a good while since, and durst not wear because the plague was in Westminster when I bought it; and it is a wonder what will be the fashion after the plague is done as to periwiggs, for nobody will dare to buy any haire for fear of the infection, that it had been cut off the heads of people dead of the plague. My Lord Brouncker, Sir J. Minnes and I up to the Vestry’ (he was then at Greenwich) ‘at the desire of the justices of the peace, in order to the doing of something for the keeping of the plague from growing; but Lord! to consider the madness of the people of the town who will, because they are forbid, come in crowds along with the dead corpses to see them buried; but we agreed on some orders for the prevention thereof. Among other stories, one was very passionate, me-thought, of a complaint brought against a man in the town for taking a child from London from an infected house. Alderman Hooker told us it was the child of a very able citizen in Gracious Street’ (Gracechurch Street), ‘a saddler, who had buried all the rest of his children with the plague, and himself and his wife being now shut up and in despair of escaping, did desire only to save the life of this little child; and so prevailed to have it received stark naked into the arms of a friend who brought it, having put it into fresh clothes, to Greenwich, where upon hearing the story we did agree it should be permitted to be received and kept in the town.’
So the days went on and the grass waved in Whitehall Court, and to quote Pepys again: ‘Lord! how everybody’s looks and discourse in the streets is of death and nothing else, and few people going up and down, that the town is like a place distressed and forsaken.’
None but those whom absolute necessity kept in London stayed in the infected air; the works at S. Paul’s were stopped; all meetings and lectures ceased, with good reason, since to gather people together was but to spread the infection.
Christopher Wren profited by the cessation of his London work, to travel abroad. Before going he had much to settle; to help Mr. Evelyn find a tutor, ‘a perfect Grecian and more than commonly mathematical,’ for his son. This youth went two years later, at the age of thirteen, to Trinity College, Oxford, ‘being newly out of long coates.’
‘THE WORLD GOVERNED BY WORDS.’
Wren’s Oxford Professorship, and his works, both there and at Cambridge, required to be set in good order before he could go. At Oxford he was engaged on the repairs of Trinity College, for his friend Dr. Bathurst.[101] On June 22, 1665, Wren writes to them as follows:—