On the eighteenth of this month news arrived in London that the plague was in France and Italy.  These tidings were at first whispered about town; but no one dared express aloud the soul-quailing intelligence.  When any one met a friend in the street, he only cried as he hurried on, “You know!”—­ while the other, with an ejaculation of fear and horror, would answer,—­ “What will become of us?” At length it was mentioned in the newspapers.  The paragraph was inserted in an obscure part:  “We regret to state that there can be no longer a doubt of the plague having been introduced at Leghorn, Genoa, and Marseilles.”  No word of comment followed; each reader made his own fearful one.  We were as a man who hears that his house is burning, and yet hurries through the streets, borne along by a lurking hope of a mistake, till he turns the corner, and sees his sheltering roof enveloped in a flame.  Before it had been a rumour; but now in words uneraseable, in definite and undeniable print, the knowledge went forth.  Its obscurity of situation rendered it the more conspicuous:  the diminutive letters grew gigantic to the bewildered eye of fear:  they seemed graven with a pen of iron, impressed by fire, woven in the clouds, stamped on the very front of the universe.

The English, whether travellers or residents, came pouring in one great revulsive stream, back on their own country; and with them crowds of Italians and Spaniards.  Our little island was filled even to bursting.  At first an unusual quantity of specie made its appearance with the emigrants; but these people had no means of receiving back into their hands what they spent among us.  With the advance of summer, and the increase of the distemper, rents were unpaid, and their remittances failed them.  It was impossible to see these crowds of wretched, perishing creatures, late nurslings of luxury, and not stretch out a hand to save them.  As at the conclusion of the eighteenth century, the English unlocked their hospitable store, for the relief of those driven from their homes by political revolution; so now they were not backward in affording aid to the victims of a more wide-spreading calamity.  We had many foreign friends whom we eagerly sought out, and relieved from dreadful penury.  Our Castle became an asylum for the unhappy.  A little population occupied its halls.  The revenue of its possessor, which had always found a mode of expenditure congenial to his generous nature, was now attended to more parsimoniously, that it might embrace a wider portion of utility.  It was not however money, except partially, but the necessaries of life, that became scarce.  It was difficult to find an immediate remedy.  The usual one of imports was entirely cut off.  In this emergency, to feed the very people to whom we had given refuge, we were obliged to yield to the plough and the mattock our pleasure-grounds and parks.  Live stock diminished sensibly in the country, from the effects of the great demand in the market.  Even the poor deer, our antlered proteges, were obliged to fall for the sake of worthier pensioners.  The labour necessary to bring the lands to this sort of culture, employed and fed the offcasts of the diminished manufactories.