THE PLAGUE.--THE FIRE.--WREN.--LONDON REBUILT
In 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.