filthy streets, as in beleaguered fortresses; for
robbers, it' not armies, occupied the roads
beyond their gates; husbandmen were starving
feudal slaves; religion was mainly
superstition; ignorance was dense and morals
were debased; little control was set upon
the passions. To such men came the
pestilence, which was said to have slain thirteen
millions of Chinese, to have depopulated
India, to have destroyed in Cairo fifteen
thousand lives a day. Those were exaggerated
statements, but they were credited, and
terrified the people. Certainly vessels with
dead crews drifted about in the Mediterranean,
and brought corruption and infection
to the shores on which they stranded.

In what spirit did the people, superstitious as
they were in those old times, meet the calamity?
Many committed suicide in frenzy;
merchants and rich men, seeking to divert
the wrath of Heaven from themselves, carried
their treasure to the churches and the monasteries;
where, if the monks, fearing to receive
infection with it, shut their gates against any
such offering, it was desperately thrown to
them over their walls. Even sound men,
corroded by anxiety, wandered about livid as
the dead. Houses quitted by their
inhabitants tumbled to ruin. By plague and by
the flight of terrified inhabitants many
thousand villages were left absolutely empty,
silent as the woods and fields. The Pope, in
Avignon, was forced, because all the church-
yards were full, to consecrate as a burial-
place the river rhone, and assure to the
faithful an interment, if not in holy ground,
at least in holy water. How the dead were
carted out of towns for burial in pits, and
how the terror of the people coined the fancy
that through indecent haste many were
hurried out and thrown into those pits while
living, every one knows: it was the incident
of plague at all times. Italy was reported to
have lost half its inhabitants. The Venetians
fled to the islands and forsook their city,
losing three men in four; and in Padua, when
the plague ceased, two-thirds of the
inhabitants were missing. This is the black
death, which began towards the close of the
year thirteen hundred and forty-eight to
ravage England; and of which Antony Wood
says extravagantly, that, at the close of it,
scarcely a tenth part of the people of this
country remained living.

Churches were shunned as places of infection,
but enriched with mad donations and
bequests; what little instruction had before
been imparted ceased; covetousness increased,
and when health returned men were amazed
to observe how largely the proportion of
lawyers to the rest of the community had
been augmented. So many sudden deaths
had begotten endless disputes about inheritance.
Brothers deserted brothers; even
parents fled from their children, leaving them
to die untended. The sick were nursed, when,
they were nursed at all, by greedy hirelings
at enormous charge. The wealthy lady, noble
of birth, trained in the best refinement of
her time, as pure and modest perhaps as she
was beautiful, could sometimes hire no better
nurse than a street ruffian to minister to her
in her mortal sickness. It appears most
probable that this pestilence, which historians
often dismiss in a paragraph, destroyed a
fourth part of the inhabitants of Europe.
The curious fact follows, which accords with
one of the most mysterious of all the certain
laws of nature, that the numbers of the people
were in some degree replenished by a very
marked increase in the fruitfulness of
marriage. We know how the poor, lodged in
places dangerous to life, surround themselves
with little families, and how births multiply
as deaths increase among them. To this
natural law the attention of men was strongly
forced, even at the time of the black
plague.

But lesser local pestilences arose
incessantly and the bodies of multitudes who were
not slain were weakened by the influences
that destroyed so many, while, at the same
time, few minds escaped the influence of
superstitious dread, arising out of such
calamities. The best physicians ascribed the
black plague to the grand conjunction of
Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars in the sign of
Aquarius, which took place about Lady-day,
in the year thirteen hundred and forty-five.
Such conjunctions always foreboded horrors
to men, and every plague was in this way
connected with the stars. Many a deed that
proved the dignity and beauty of man's
nature was done quietly during those days of
trial; bands of Sisters of Charity at Paris
perished in the work of mercy to the sick, and
were supplied with unfailing troops of new
recruits; but bigotry and folly had the loudest
voices, and took possession of the public ear.

Then arose in Hungary, and afterwards in
Germany, the Brotherhood of the Flagellants
—men and even women and children of all
ranks entering the order, marched about
towns in procession, each flagellant with a red
cross on the breast, back, and cap, and
carrying a triple scourge, and all recommended
to attention by the pomp of tapers and superb
banners of velvet and cloth of gold. They
multiplied so fast, and claimed rights so
independent— for they even absolved each
other— that they came to be regarded
by the church as dangerous. They were
put down at last by persecution, the
enthusiasm of the populace in their behalf
being converted into a relentless rage against
them.

The rage of the populace was felt most
severely by the Jews. Pestilence was ascribed
usually in those days to poisoned wells, and the
wells, it was said commonly, were poisoned by
the Jews. So it was at the time ot the black
plague. The persecution of the Jews began
in those days at Chillon, and spread from
Switzerland through Europe. Tortured and