The same gentleman says:[6] "Your looking-glasses will be snatched away, your mirrors cracked, your diamonds shivered in pieces; this goodly city all in shreds. Ye may seek for a pillar or threshold of your ancient dwellings, but not find one. All your spacious mansions and sumptuous monuments are then gone. Not a porch, pavement, ceiling, staircase, turret, lantern, bench, screen, pane of a window, post, nail, stone, or dust of your former houses to be seen. No, with wringing hands you may ask, where are those sweet places where we traded, feasted, slept? where we lived like masters, and shone like morning stars? No, the houses are fallen, and the householders dropped with them. We have nothing but naked streets, naked fields for shelter; not so much as a chamber to couch down our children or repose our own members, when we are spent or afflicted with sickness. Woe unto us! our sins have pulled down our houses, shaken down our city. We are the most harbourless people in the world; like foreigners rather than natives; yea, rather like beasts than men. Foxes have holes and fowls have nests, but we have neither holes or nests: our sins have deprived us of couch and covert. We should be glad if an hospital would receive us, dens or caves shelter us. The bleak air and cold ground are our only shades and refuges. But, alas! this is but the misery of the stonework, of arches, roofs, &c." [Footnote 6: London's Remembrancer, page 33,--ten years before the fire.] The following paragraph is taken from Mr. Rosewell's causes and cures of the pestilence, printed at London, in the year of the great plague 1665--a year before the fire of London. "Is it not of the Lord that the people shall labour in the very fire, and weary themselves for vanity? It is of the Lord, surely! It comes to pass, by the secret counsel of God, that these houses and cities which they build, shall either come to be consumed by fire; or else, the people shall weary themselves in vain, for vanity to no purpose; seeing it comes so soon to be destroyed and ruinated, what they build." SECTION II. ACCOUNT OF THE FIRE OF LONDON, PUBLISHED BY AUTHORITY, FROM THE "LONDON GAZETTE." Sept. 2.--About two o'clock this morning, a sudden and lamentable fire broke out in this city; beginning not far from Thames-street, near London Bridge, which continues still with great violence, and hath already burnt down to the ground many houses thereabouts: which said accident affected his Majesty with that tenderness and compassion, that he was pleased to go himself in person, with his royal highness, to give orders that all possible means should be used for quenching the fire, or stopping its further spreading: in which care the right honourable the Earl of Craven was sent by his Majesty, to be more particularly assisting to the Lord Mayor and magistrates; and several companies of his guards sent into the city, to be helpful in what means they could in so great a calamity.