De Foe has left us an inimitable romance, which he calls
"The History of the Plague in London in 1665." How much or how little
of sober fact there may be in those thrilling incidents, worked up so
marvellously by the great novelist, it is impossible to say. That
there is at least as much of fiction as of fact in the book none can
doubt. The author was a child when the plague was raging--a child of
two years' old, toddling about the butcher's shop. The plague of 1665
did not travel far; out of London its incidence was comparatively
trifling. The cholera has visited us again and again, but never on a
scale to demoralize the people at large. Only once in our history has
the destroyer passed over England, leaving probably no shire
unvisited by his awful presence, and no parish in which there was not
one dead. It is never fair to draw inferences from the silence of
historians; but it is at least significant that among all
contemporary writers who have made mention of the Black Death--as it
has been agreed to call it--the Black Death in the reign of Edward
III.--there is little mention of any panic, few ugly tales of
desertion of the dying, no flagrant instances of miserable creatures
crying that the wells were poisoned. On the contrary, we have proof
that as a rule men died at their posts during all that trying time,
that those in authority never lost their heads, and that though there
must, of course, have been isolated cases of abject fear, expressing
itself in the maddest extravagances of despair, yet we have to look
long and look far and wide to find such cases--and after all our
search may be fruitless.
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