the following summer, and in the end more than 97,000 people perished out of a population of 460,000. Then, on September 2, came that other catastrophe, the Great Fire. Starting in a baker’s shop in Pudding Lane, near the Monument, it was driven westwards by a strong east wind. The London of Stuart days gave the Fire every possible help. Not much survives to-day to show us what things were like, but the quaint, timber-fronted houses of Staple Inn (Holborn) and No. 17, Fleet Street, and the pictures painted at the time, give us a fair idea of the inflammable nature of the buildings; and when we remember that these wooden houses, old, dry, and coated with pitch, were in some streets so close to those opposite that it was possible to shake hands from the overhanging upper stories, we are not surprised at the rapidity with which the Fire spread. The diaries of two gentlemen—Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, the former one of the King’s Ministers, the latter a wealthy and learned gentleman of the Court—bring home to us plainly the terror of the seven days’ visitation. To begin with, very few took any special notice of the outbreak: fires were too common to cause great consternation. Even Pepys himself tells us that he returned to bed; but when the morning came and it was still burning, he was disturbed. Says he: “By and by Jane tells me that she hears that above 800 houses have been burned down to-night by the fire we saw, and that it is now burning down all Fish Street, by London Bridge. So I made myself ready presently, and walked to the Tower; and there got up upon one of the high places; and there I did see the houses at that end of the bridge all on fire, and an infinite great fire on this and the other side of the end of the bridge.” London Bridge, as you will remember from a former chapter, was very narrow, and the houses projected out over the River, held in place by enormous timber struts; and these, with the wooden frames of the three-storied houses, gave the fire a good hold. Moreover the burning buildings, falling on the Bridge, blocked the way to any who would have fought the flames. After about a third of the buildings had been destroyed the fire was stopped by the pulling down of houses and the open space; but not before it had done great damage to the stone structure itself. The heat was so intense that arches and piers which had remained firm for centuries now began to show signs of falling to pieces, and it was found necessary to spend £1,500, an enormous sum in those days, on repairs before any rebuilding could be attempted. Day after day the Fire continued. Says Evelyn: “It burned both in breadth and length, the churches, public halls, Exchange, hospitals, monuments, and ornaments, leaping after a prodigious manner from house to house and street to street, at great distances one from the other....