also confessed, and named her daughter as an accomplice: and the instruments of infection were found in the possession of the latter. It added no small credit to these stories that four men were said to have been detected in the palace at Madrid, with medicaments prepared for communicating the plague, yet they escaped, and left no trace of their flight. This news came in a letter signed by the king’s own hand, addressed to the governor of the province, and warning him to be upon his guard. There is some justice in an observation made by our author, that it seemed fated through the whole of this business that things doubtful and things certain should be intermixed, and mutually involve each other in obscurity. The total disappearance of four men, detected in a crime of such moment, even in a royal palace, where of all places their apprehension would appear to be certain, bears such an air of mystification as throws discredit on the whole story: yet we cannot suppose the Spanish monarch a party to the practising of so mischievous a deceit upon his own suffering subjects; and scarcely any other person would dare, or could be interested, to get up a trick so dangerous, and apparently so unprofitable to the contrivers and actors in it. But the people, blinded by their fears, saw neither improbability nor inconsistency in these stories. Ripamonte, evidently himself a sceptic, professes that an author was not free to canvass this subject unreservedly, so obstinately was the belief fixed both in the higher and lower classes, who maintained this breath of rumour as devotedly as they clung to their homes and altars, and all that they held most sacred. The Italians, owing perhaps to the common use of poisons among them, seem readily to have admitted such reports. When the plague broke out at Naples in 1656, it was said to have been introduced by the Spaniards, who suborned people to scatter poisoned dust in the streets. This was one of the methods which the Milanese anointers were reported to use. Tadini, one of the most eminent physicians then and there practising, who wrote an account of the plague,[123] says that he knew two young women, who on crossing themselves with holy water on coming out of church observed that a clammy powder remained on their clothes and persons, wherever the sacred sign had been made. Returning home they were seized with giddiness, and died within two days. This seems a strong case, yet it may be doubted whether they died of the plague or of imagination, for no marks of the disease appeared on their bodies. Their mother, and those who had waited on them, perished in the same unaccountable way.