“I am now going to undertake an office fitted for me.  I cannot intrigue, or work a tortuous path through the labyrinth of men’s vices and passions; but I can bring patience, and sympathy, and such aid as art affords, to the bed of disease; I can raise from earth the miserable orphan, and awaken to new hopes the shut heart of the mourner.  I can enchain the plague in limits, and set a term to the misery it would occasion; courage, forbearance, and watchfulness, are the forces I bring towards this great work.

“O, I shall be something now!  From my birth I have aspired like the eagle —­but, unlike the eagle, my wings have failed, and my vision has been blinded.  Disappointment and sickness have hitherto held dominion over me; twin born with me, my would, was for ever enchained by the shall not, of these my tyrants.  A shepherd-boy that tends a silly flock on the mountains, was more in the scale of society than I. Congratulate me then that I have found fitting scope for my powers.  I have often thought of offering my services to the pestilence-stricken towns of France and Italy; but fear of paining you, and expectation of this catastrophe, withheld me.  To England and to Englishmen I dedicate myself.  If I can save one of her mighty spirits from the deadly shaft; if I can ward disease from one of her smiling cottages, I shall not have lived in vain.”

Strange ambition this!  Yet such was Adrian.  He appeared given up to contemplation, averse to excitement, a lowly student, a man of visions—­ but afford him worthy theme, and—­

  Like to the lark at break of day arising,
  From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate.[1]

so did he spring up from listlessness and unproductive thought, to the highest pitch of virtuous action.

With him went enthusiasm, the high-wrought resolve, the eye that without blenching could look at death.  With us remained sorrow, anxiety, and unendurable expectation of evil.  The man, says Lord Bacon, who hath wife and children, has given hostages to fortune.  Vain was all philosophical reasoning—­vain all fortitude—­vain, vain, a reliance on probable good.  I might heap high the scale with logic, courage, and resignation—­but let one fear for Idris and our children enter the opposite one, and, over-weighed, it kicked the beam.

The plague was in London!  Fools that we were not long ago to have foreseen this.  We wept over the ruin of the boundless continents of the east, and the desolation of the western world; while we fancied that the little channel between our island and the rest of the earth was to preserve us alive among the dead.  It were no mighty leap methinks from Calais to Dover.  The eye easily discerns the sister land; they were united once; and the little path that runs between looks in a map but as a trodden footway through high grass.  Yet this small interval was to save us:  the sea was to rise a wall of adamant—­without, disease and misery—­within, a shelter from evil, a nook of the garden of paradise—­a particle of celestial soil, which no evil could invade—­truly we were wise in our generation, to imagine all these things!