“Dr. Hodges tells us that about the close of 1664, two or three persons died suddenly with symptoms of the plague in one family at Westminster, that some timid neighbours of theirs took fright and removed into the City of London carrying the taint of pestilence with them whereby the disease, which existed only in a family or two, gained strength and spread abroad, and ‘for want of confining the persons first seized with it, the whole city was in a little time irrecoverably infected.’ “In December a hard frost set in, which lasted three months, and during that time very few died of the plague. But the disease was not extinguished; for, in the middle of the Christmas holidays, the doctor was called to a young man in a fever, who after two days ‘had two risings about the bigness of a nutmeg,’ ‘one on each thigh,’ with a ‘black hue’ and a ‘circle round them.’ By these and subsequent symptoms, he judged it to be a case of plague. It did not prove fatal. “When the frost broke, the disease gained ground and extended into several parishes; and the authorities issued an order ‘to shut up all the infected houses,’ so as to prevent ingress and egress. To give effect to this order, the houses of the infected were to be marked with a red cross, and to carry the inscription, ‘_Lord have mercy upon us_,’ and a guard was set whose duty it was to hand food and medicine to the sick, and to prevent them from going abroad till forty days after their recovery. In spite of these harsh measures, ‘the plague more and more increased.’ Nor will this surprise us if we imagine the frantic and successful efforts that must have been made by the non-infected to escape, and the temptation to servants and nurses to appropriate and remove the property of the dying and dead. Indeed, Dr. Hodges accuses the nurses of strangling their patients, and secretly conveying the pestilential taint from sores of the infected to those who were well; and he justifies his accusation of ‘these abandoned miscreants,’ the Gamps and Prigs of the seventeenth century, by two instances; the one of a nurse who, ‘as she was leaving the house of a family, all dead, loaded with her robberies, fell down dead under her burden in the streets,’ the other of a ‘worthy citizen’ ‘who, being suspected dying by his nurse, was beforehand stripped by her; but recovering again, he came a second time into the world naked.’