t there was no such thing as contagion from the
sick people to the sound; and so strongly did this whimsy prevail among
people that they ran all together promiscuously, sick and well. Not
the Mahometans, who, prepossessed with the principle of predestination,
value nothing of contagion, let it be in what it will, could be more
obstinate than the people of London; they that were perfectly sound,
and came out of the wholesome air, as we call it, into the city, made
nothing of going into the same houses and chambers, nay, even into the
same beds, with those that had the distemper upon them, and were not
recovered.

Some, indeed, paid for their audacious boldness with the price of their
lives; an infinite number fell sick, and the physicians had more work
than ever, only with this difference, that more of their patients
recovered; that is to say, they generally recovered, but certainly there
were more people infected and fell sick now, when there did not die
above a thousand or twelve hundred in a week, than there was when there
died five or six thousand a week, so entirely negligent were the people
at that time in the great and dangerous case of health and infection,
and so ill were they able to take or accept of the advice of those who
cautioned them for their good.

The people being thus returned, as it were, in general, it was very
strange to find that in their inquiring after their friends, some whole
families were so entirely swept away that there was no remembrance of
them left, neither was anybody to be found to possess or show any title
to that little they had left; for in such cases what was to be found was
generally embezzled and purloined, some gone one way, some another.

It was said such abandoned effects came to the king, as the universal
heir; upon which we are told, and I suppose it was in part true, that
the king granted all such, as deodands, to the Lord Mayor and Court of
Aldermen of London, to be applied to the use of the poor, of whom there
were very many. For it is to be observed, that though the occasions of
relief and the objects of distress were very many more in the time of
the violence of the plague than now after all was over, yet the distress
of the poor was more now a great deal than it was then, because all
the sluices of general charity were now shut. People supposed the main
occasion to be over, and so stopped their hands; whereas particular
objects were still very moving, and the distres