Proceeding to Domestic Preparations, he says, "The pestilence being a contagious distemper, it is one of the first principles that every family should abstain, as much as possible, from conversing with others. When a house is infected with the plague, we shut it up. This was done in the late plague of 1665 with great severity, none being suffered to go in or come out. Here the design is to keep the family from giving the plague to the people. When a household are sound and uninfected, they should shut themselves up to keep others from giving the plague to them.-I know a family at this time living in Marseilles, who, having effectually locked themselves up within their own house, and not conversed with the people of the town, never had the distemper at all.”

"In order therefore to direct any particular family, who have substance to enable them to shut themselves up in so strict a manner as would be absolutely necessary," he proceeds "to describe a family

so secluded," the account being, he says, "partly historical and partly for direction."

We must here however premise, that it is not in order to second his recommendation of this or any other preservative against the plague that the present account is republished: but merely as an interesting and affecting narrative, presenting the best picture I have seen of the state of London at that awful period.

"The family I speak of," he says, "lived in the parish of St. Alban's, Wood Street. They consisted of the master of the family and his wife, being either of them between forty and fifty years of age, and in a pretty good state of health; of five children, three daughters and two sons; two maidservants, and an apprentice. The person was a wholesale grocer, and a considerable dealer. He had another prentice, nearly out of his time; a porter and a boy employed in his business: but, seeing the desolation that was coming upon the city, he dismissed the boy, and made

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him go away by the carrier to his friends in Staffordshire. To his eldest apprentice he gave the remainder of his time, and he went away also. As to the porter, he did not lodge in the house before so there was no occasion for dismissing him. But, he being a poor man, and likely to fall into distress for want of his employ, his master engaged him to come every day and sit at his door, in a lodge which he made for him, from nine in the morning till six at night, as a watchman, and to receive any orders, go of necessary errands, carry letters to and from the posthouse, and the like. A wooden window covered with plates of tin, was made, up two pair of stairs, in which was fixed a pully with a rope to let down or draw up any thing that was wanted and by this rope they often let down victuals and cordials, and what else they thought fit, to the poor man, the porter; and especially his wages constantly every week, or oftener, as he wanted them. But, whenever this window was to be

opened, a flash of gunpowder was made near it, and nothing suffered to come in from abroad till it was sufficiently fumigated and purified."

Such was the contrivance made for the only intercourse which was to be held with the world without, after the proper time for shutting up the family should have come. But our author enters largely into the particulars of the large store of provisions which the hero of his narrative thought it necessary previously to lay in, and which the nature of his business and his accommodations enabled him to procure and stow without too much attracting observation. He then proceeds as follows:

"With these preparations he began. He forbore shutting himself quite in for several months after the plague was begun, and even till there died above a thousand a week; because, though the infection was very terrible in the out-parishes, and especially in the west part of the town, that is to say in Holborn, St. Giles's, Fleet

street, and the Strand, yet the city was very healthy: nor was the distemper felt within the walls, to any degree, till the latter end of June or the beginning of July: for in the second week of July, when there died, as by the weekly bills appeared, 1268 of all distempers, there yet died but 28 of the plague, in all the ninety-seven parishes within the walls, and but 16 in the whole body of buildings on the Surry side of the water. However the next week after it was doubled again; and, as he foresaw the infection overspreading the whole city and all the out-parts, like a dreadful torrent, as he had always said it would do, he began to put his resolutions more strictly in execution for from the beginning of July he suffered none of his family to stir out without the walls of the city, nor in the city to any public place, market, exchange, church, or the like; and wrote to all his dealers and correspondents in the country not to write for any more goods, for that he could not send any thing out into the streets to