The second tract was written by one whose Christian name is surely Jeremiah. It is called _Vox Civitatis_. It is the Lamentation of London under the Plague. The City mourns her departed merchants. "Issachar stands still for want of work." Her children are starving; her apprentices, "the children of knights and justices of the county," are rated with beggars, and buried in the highway like malefactors. As for the clergy, they did not forsake their flocks; they sent them away--all who could go--before they themselves fled. The physicians and the surgeons have fled. Yet some have remained--parsons, physicians, and surgeons. The Lord Mayor, too, remained at his post. Then he argues that no one, in whatever station, has the right to desert his post. None are useless. He declaims against the inhumanity of those who refuse shelter to a stricken man, and he calls upon those who have food to return. The whole composition is filled with pious ejaculations; it certainly is the work of some city clergyman. London is stricken for her sins; yet there is mercy in the chastisement. The author is always finding consolation in the thought that the punishment will lead to reformation. Yet the work is a cry of suffering, of pity, and of indignation. The writer does not relate, he alludes to what everybody knows; yet he makes us see the workshops closed, 'Change deserted, churches shut, all the better class fled, prentices thrust out to die in the streets, the people with no work and no money, the servants left to guard the warehouses dead; even in Cheapside not a place where one can change a purse of gold; "Watling Street like an empty Cloyster." The Plague is terrible, but it is the chastisement of the Lord. He hath taken the City into His own hands; that may be borne; the worst, the most terrible thing is the desertion of the City and the people by the masters; the abandonment of those dependent upon their employers--this is the burden of the cry. To those who study the gleams and glimpses of Plague-time in these papers, the worst suffering in every time of pestilence was caused by the cessation of work and of trade. The master gone, the servants had no work and no wages--how were the children to be fed? With one little touch of human nature the tract concludes. The writer was a scholar; he is jealous concerning his style. "If," he says, "this Declaration wants Science, or that Eloquence that might beseem me, consider my Trouble, the Absence of my Orators, the shutting up of my Libraries, so that I was content with a common Secretary." It is _Vox Civitatis_ London that speaks; her libraries are those of St. Paul's, Zion College, Gresham College, Whittington College; the "common Secretary" is the writer. Such is his proud humility--a "common Secretary!" * * * * * Now for another twice-told tale.