All this was the effect of the hurry the people were in, after the first notion of the plaque being at hand was among them, and which may be said to be from about Michaelmas 1664, but more particularly after the two men died in St Giles’s in the beginning of December; and again, after another alarm in February.  For when the plague evidently spread itself, they soon began to see the folly of trusting to those unperforming creatures who had gulled them of their money; and then their fears worked another way, namely, to amazement and stupidity, not knowing what course to take or what to do either to help or relieve themselves.  But they ran about from one neighbour’s house to another, and even in the streets from one door to another, with repeated cries of, ’Lord, have mercy upon us!  What shall we do?’

Indeed, the poor people were to be pitied in one particular thing in which they had little or no relief, and which I desire to mention with a serious awe and reflection, which perhaps every one that reads this may not relish; namely, that whereas death now began not, as we may say, to hover over every one’s head only, but to look into their houses and chambers and stare in their faces.  Though there might be some stupidity and dulness of the mind (and there was so, a great deal), yet there was a great deal of just alarm sounded into the very inmost soul, if I may so say, of others.  Many consciences were awakened; many hard hearts melted into tears; many a penitent confession was made of crimes long concealed.  It would wound the soul of any Christian to have heard the dying groans of many a despairing creature, and none durst come near to comfort them.  Many a robbery, many a murder, was then confessed aloud, and nobody surviving to record the accounts of it.  People might be heard, even into the streets as we passed along, calling upon God for mercy through Jesus Christ, and saying, ’I have been a thief, ’I have been an adulterer’, ‘I have been a murderer’, and the like, and none durst stop to make the least inquiry into such things or to administer comfort to the poor creatures that in the anguish both of soul and body thus cried out.  Some of the ministers did visit the sick at first and for a little while, but it was not to be done.  It would have been present death to have gone into some houses.  The very buriers of the dead, who were the hardenedest creatures in town, were sometimes beaten back and so terrified that they durst not go into houses where the whole families were swept away together, and where the circumstances were more particularly horrible, as some were; but this was, indeed, at the first heat of the distemper.

Time inured them to it all, and they ventured everywhere afterwards without hesitation, as I shall have occasion to mention at large hereafter.