hat the immortal plays
of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson were acted. When next you read a play of
Shakespeare, remember the stage projecting into the pit; the people in
the pit all standing, the gallants on the stage talking and smoking, the
ladies in the boxes, the boys enjoying apples and nuts and ale and new
books, and the actors playing partly on the stage advanced and partly on
the stage behind.

50. THE TERROR OF THE PLAGUE.

PART I.

You have seen the City as it appeared to one who walked about its
streets and watched the people. It was free, busy and prosperous, except
at rare intervals, when its own internal dissensions, or the civil wars
of the country, or the pretensions of the Sovereign, disturbed the peace
of the City. Behind this prosperity, however, lay hid all through the
middle ages, and down to two hundred years ago, four great and
ever-present terrors. The first was the Terror of Leprosy: the second
the Terror of Famine: the third was the Terror of Plague: the last was
the Terror of Fire.

[Illustration: CIVIL COSTUME ABOUT 1620.

(_From a contemporary broadside._)]

[Illustration: COSTUME OF A LAWYER.

(_From a broadside, dated 1623._)]

As for the first two, we have seen how lazar houses were established
outside every town, and how public granaries were built. Let us consider
the third. The Plague broke out so often that there was hardly any time
between the tenth and the seventeenth century when some living person
could not remember a visitation of this awful scourge. It appeared in
London first--i.e. the first mention of it occurs in history--in the
year 962: again in 1094: again in 1111: then there seems to have been a
respite for 250 years. In the year 1348 the Plague carried off many
thousands: in 1361 it appeared again: in 1367 and in 1369. In 1407
30,000 were carried off in London alone by the Plague. In 1478 a plague
raged throughout the country, which was said to have destroyed more
people than the Wars of the Roses. But we must accept all mediaeval
estimates of numbers as indicating no more than great mortality. With
the sixteenth century began a period of a hundred and sixty years,
marked with attacks of the Plague constantly recurring, and every time
more fatal and more widespread. Nothing teaches the conditions of human
life more plainly than the history of the Plague in London. We are
placed in the world in the midst of dangers, and we have to find out for
ourselves how