A Journal of the Plague Year: Being Observations or Memorials of the Most Remarkable Occurrences, as Well Public as Private, Which Happened in London During the Last Great Visitation in 1665. Written by a Citizen Who Continued All the While in LondonDefoe, Daniel
History
A Journal of the Plague Year: Being Observations or Memorials of the Most Remarkable Occurrences, as Well Public as Private, Which Happened in London During the Last Great Visitation in 1665. Written by a Citizen Who Continued All the While in London
Defoe, Daniel
Great Fire, London, England, 1666 -- Fiction; Historical fiction; London (England) -- History -- 17th century -- Fiction; Plague -- Fiction
make me confess that I saw it, which, indeed, if I had I must
have lied. But the woman, turning upon me, looked in my face, and
fancied I laughed, in which her imagination deceived her too, for
I really did not laugh, but was very seriously reflecting how the
poor people were terrified by the force of their own imagination.
However, she turned from me, called me profane fellow, and a
scoffer; told me that it was a time of God’s anger, and dreadful
judgements were approaching, and that despisers such as I should
wander and perish.
The people about her seemed disgusted as well as she; and I found
there was no persuading them that I did not laugh at them, and
that I should be rather mobbed by them than be able to undeceive
them. So I left them; and this appearance passed for as real as
the blazing star itself.
Another encounter I had in the open day also; and this was in
going through a narrow passage from Petty France into Bishopsgate
Churchyard, by a row of alms-houses. There are two churchyards to
Bishopsgate church or parish; one we go over to pass from the
place called Petty France into Bishopsgate Street, coming out
just by the church door; the other is on the side of the narrow
passage where the alms-houses are on the left; and a dwarf-wall
with a palisado on it on the right hand, and the city wall on the
other side more to the right.
In this narrow passage stands a man looking through between the
palisadoes into the burying-place, and as many people as the
narrowness of the passage would admit to stop, without hindering
the passage of others, and he was talking mightily eagerly to
them, and pointing now to one place, then to another, and
affirming that he saw a ghost walking upon such a gravestone
there. He described the shape, the posture, and the movement of
it so exactly that it was the greatest matter of amazement to him
in the world that everybody did not see it as well as he. On a
sudden he would cry, ‘There it is; now it comes this way.’ Then,
’Tis turned back’; till at length he persuaded the people into so
firm a belief of it, that one fancied he saw it, and another
fancied he saw it; and thus he came every day making a strange
hubbub, considering it was in so narrow a passage, till
Bishopsgate clock struck eleven, and then the ghost would seem to
start, and, as if he were called away, disappeared on a sudden.
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