“A stiffe and freezing horror sucks up the rivers of my blood; my haire stands on ende with the panting of my braines: mine eye balls are ready to start out, being beaten with the billowes of my teares: out of my weeping pen does the ink mournfully and more bitterly than gall drop on the pale-faced paper, even when I do but thinke how the bowels of my sicke country have been torne. _Apollo_, therefore, and you bewitching silver-tongued _Muses_, get you gone: I invocate none of your names. Sorrow and truth, sit you on each side of me, whilst I am delivered of this deadly burden: prompt me that I may utter ruthfull and passionate condolement: arme my trembling hand, that I may boldly rip up and anatomize the ulcerous body of this _Anthropophagized Plague_: lend me art (without any counterfeit shadowing) to paint and delineate to the life the whole story of this mortall and pestiferous battaile. And you the ghosts of those more (by many) than 40,000, that with the virulent poison of infection have been driven out of your earthly dwellings: you desolate hand-wringing widowes, that beate your bosomes over your departing husbandes: you wofully distracted mothers that with dishevelled hair fall into swounds, while you lie kissing the insensible cold lips of your breathless infants: you outcast and downtrodden orphans, that shall many a yeare hence remember more freshly to mourne, when your mourning garments shall look old and be forgotten: and you the Genii of all those emptyed families, whose habitations are now among the Antipodes: joine all your hands together, and with your bodies cast a ring about me: let me behold your ghastly vizages, that my paper may receive their true pictures and eccho forth your grones through the hollow trunke of my pen, and rain down your gummy tears into mine incke, that even marble bosomes may be shaken with terrour, and hearts of adamant melt into compassion.” He goes on to describe the many who ran away:— “It was no boot to bid them take their heels, for away they trudge thick and threefold: some riding, some on foote, some without bootes, some in their slippers, by water, by land, swom they westward: many to Gravesend none went unless they were driven: for whosoever landed there never came back again. Hacknies, water-men, and wagons were not so terribly employed many a year: so that within a short time there was not a good horse in Smithfield, nor a coach to be set eye on: for after the world had once run upon the wheeles of the pest cart, neither coach nor caroach durst appeare in his likenesse. Let us pursue these run-awayes no longer, but leave them in the unmercifull hands of the country-hardheaded Hobbinolls (who are ordained to be their tormentors), and return back to the siege of the citie. * * * * *