It was not, however, until after the great fire in 1666, at the rebuilding of London, as it were, that any measures were taken to secure the public health. In the year 1665, during the time of the great and terrible plague, our streets were narrow, and the houses, which were built of wood, closed inwards towards each other, one story projecting considerably above the other, till they seemed almost to touch each other at the top, and looking upwards from the street towards the sky was very like looking up from the bottom of a well. There were scarcely any sewers; the streets were damp and wet, and nearly everything in the shape of offal was thrown into them, while certain corporate bodies, the ecclesiastical authorities even, contended stoutly for the right of sending their swine into the streets to feed upon such garbage as they found plentifully therein. It would also appear that the general habits of the citizens in no way counteracted the bad effects of their faulty architecture by domestic cleanliness. The celebrated Erasmus asserts that the interior of the dwellings in London was disgusting to the last degree. He plainly ascribed ‘the sweating sickness,’ which was a species of plague, to the incommodious form and bad position of the houses, the filthiness of the streets, and the sluttishness within doors. In a letter to a physician of Cardinal Wolsey’s, in which he gives an account of the domestic habits of our countrymen in those days, he says, “There is a degree of uncleanliness, and even of filth, pourtrayed, of which we can have no conception in our times.” He continues: “The floors are commonly of clay, strewed with rushes, which were occasionally removed, but underneath lies unmolested an ancient collection of beer, grease, fragments of fish, spittle, the excrements of dogs, cats, and everything that was nasty.” Hentzer observes, that even the floor of the presence-chamber of the Queen Elizabeth, in Greenwich Palace, “was covered with hay after the English fashion;” and Hume remarks, as a proof of the meanness of living in those days, “that the comptroller of the household of Edward the Sixth paid only 30s. a year for his house in Channel Row, which like the generality of the streets of London was unpaved and undrained, and contained an accumulation of the offal and such filth as was habitually thrown into them.”