[24] The following form extracts from the above articles of Mr. Mackenzie:--“Some time ago there was sent to this office a series of advertisements in favour of the Independent and West Middlesex Insurance Company, which were entered and paid for in the regular course of business. We are cautious about quack medical advertisements, none of them that we are aware has ever been admitted into our columns; but it never entered into our heads for one moment, that an insurance company professing to be incorporated by special acts of parliament, was in truth a quack company, got up for the premeditated purpose of imposing on the public in matters of fire and life. Hence the advertisements of this company glided through our columns from time to time to time.... But we were astonished lately to learn that this was a spurious insurance company hatched in London two years ago.” “Under these circumstances, our duty, we humbly conceive, is at once plain and decisive, and therefore we proceed to discharge it for the sake of the public, whose faithful and unflinching servants we at all times profess to be. In a word, we raise our voice and warn the public against this Independent West Middlesex Insurance Company. It is a false and fictitious company.” “In their polices of insurance they take care to provide that ‘the capital stock and funds of the said company shall alone be answerable to the demands thereupon under this policy.’ Why, what is the value of their capital stock and funds, if as we say the parties themselves forming the said company are utterly worthless, being in fact no better than a parcel of tricksters in London, disowned, or repudiated, or condemned by every respectable person to whom reference is made? There can scarcely, we think, be anything so base or so nefarious as taking premiums from unsuspecting people, and making them believe they are secured against the contingencies of life, or the risk of fire, and yet mocking them in their calamities when the bubble bursts.” [25] The cholera first visited England about the beginning of August 1348. From the seaport towns on the coasts of Dorsetshire, Devonshire, and Somersetshire, it ran to Bristol, and the men of Gloucester established a quarantine between the two places. But this “familiar fury” mocked then as now at the quarantine, and walking in darkness appeared in Gloucestershire to the horror of its inhabitants. From thence it passed by way of Oxford to London, finally spreading all over England, “scattering everywhere such ruin and desolation that of all sorts hardly the tenth person was left alive.”