Ignoble as was Pepys, he yet showed real moral courage during the Plague. When that great enemy of cities attacked London he, very wisely, sent his family into the country at Woolwich, while he remained faithful to his duty and continued to work at the navy in Greenwich, Deptford, and London. I cannot find in the Diary any mention of any particular attraction that kept him in London during those awful five months; he would, no doubt, have mentioned her name if there had been such; yet candour compels me to observe that there was seldom any one attraction for Mr. Pepys, unless poor Deb Willet may have somehow mastered--temporarily--his wayward heart. But, as might have been expected, he was little more virtuous during his wife’s absence than before; indeed, possibly the imminent danger of death may have led him to enjoy his life while yet he might, with his usual fits of agonized remorse, whose effects upon his conduct were brief. We owe far more to his organizing power and honesty--not a bigoted variety--than is generally remembered. His babble is not the best medium for vigorous description, and you will not get from Pepys any idea of the epidemic comparable with that which you will get from the journalist Defoe; yet through those months there lurks a feeling of horror which still impresses mankind. The momentary glimpse of a citizen who stumbles over the “corps” of a man dead of the plague, and running home tells his pregnant wife; she dies of fear forthwith; a man, his wife, and three children dying and being buried on one day; persons quick to-day and dead to-morrow--not in scores, but in hundreds; ten thousand dying in a week; the horrid atmosphere of fear and suspicion which overlay London; and Pepys himself setting his papers in order, so that men might think well of him should it please the Lord to take him suddenly: all give us a sense of doom all the more poignant because recently we went through a much milder version of the same experience ourselves. The papers talked glibly of the influenza as “The Plague.” How different it was from the real bubonic plague is shown by the statistics. In five months of 1665 there died of the plague in the little London of that day no less than about 70,000 people, according to the bills of mortality; in truth, probably far more; that is to say, probably a fifth of the people perished. There is no doubt that the bubonic plague kept back the development of cities, and therefore of civilization, for centuries, and that the partial conquest of the rat has been one of the greatest achievements of the human race. What is happening in Lord Howe Island, where it is exceedingly doubtful whether rats or men shall survive in that beautiful speck of land, shows how slender is the hold which mankind has upon the earth; and wherever the rat is able to breed unchecked, man is liable to sink back into savagery. The rat, the tubercle bacillus, and the bacillus of typhoid are the three great