At a distance from facts one draws conclusions which appear infallible, which yet when put to the test of reality, vanish like unreal dreams.  I had ridiculed the fears of my countrymen, when they related to others; now that they came home to myself, I paused.  The Rubicon, I felt, was passed; and it behoved me well to reflect what I should do on this hither side of disease and danger.  According to the vulgar superstition, my dress, my person, the air I breathed, bore in it mortal danger to myself and others.  Should I return to the Castle, to my wife and children, with this taint upon me?  Not surely if I were infected; but I felt certain that I was not—­a few hours would determine the question—­I would spend these in the forest, in reflection on what was to come, and what my future actions were to be.  In the feeling communicated to me by the sight of one struck by the plague, I forgot the events that had excited me so strongly in London; new and more painful prospects, by degrees were cleared of the mist which had hitherto veiled them.  The question was no longer whether I should share Adrian’s toils and danger; but in what manner I could, in Windsor and the neighbourhood, imitate the prudence and zeal which, under his government, produced order and plenty in London, and how, now pestilence had spread more widely, I could secure the health of my own family.

I spread the whole earth out as a map before me.  On no one spot of its surface could I put my finger and say, here is safety.  In the south, the disease, virulent and immedicable, had nearly annihilated the race of man; storm and inundation, poisonous winds and blights, filled up the measure of suffering.  In the north it was worse—­the lesser population gradually declined, and famine and plague kept watch on the survivors, who, helpless and feeble, were ready to fall an easy prey into their hands.

I contracted my view to England.  The overgrown metropolis, the great heart of mighty Britain, was pulseless.  Commerce had ceased.  All resort for ambition or pleasure was cut off—­the streets were grass-grown—­the houses empty—­the few, that from necessity remained, seemed already branded with the taint of inevitable pestilence.  In the larger manufacturing towns the same tragedy was acted on a smaller, yet more disastrous scale.  There was no Adrian to superintend and direct, while whole flocks of the poor were struck and killed.  Yet we were not all to die.  No truly, though thinned, the race of man would continue, and the great plague would, in after years, become matter of history and wonder.  Doubtless this visitation was for extent unexampled—­more need that we should work hard to dispute its progress; ere this men have gone out in sport, and slain their thousands and tens of thousands; but now man had become a creature of price; the life of one of them was of more worth than the so called treasures of kings.  Look at his thought-endued countenance, his graceful limbs, his majestic brow, his wondrous mechanism—­the type and model of this best work of God is not to be cast aside as a broken vessel—­he shall be preserved, and his children and his children’s children carry down the name and form of man to latest time.