This condition of the country and this mode of life themselves constitute the most powerful causes of epidemics; and an extraordinary concurrence and concentration of these causes are manifested in the combination of the circumstances which have been enumerated, namely, in the malarious state of the greater part of the kingdom, in the confined space of the towns, in the deficiency and putrescency of the food, in the inadequacy of the means of protection from cold, and in the intemperance of the people. These were the true sources of the malignity and mortality of the pestilences of that age. We have no reliable evidence of the actual mortality produced by these terrible diseases; for no physician has left such an account of the epidemics of which he was an eye-witness as enables us to determine it, and there was no Registrar-General to fill up the momentous columns included in his death-roll. We can therefore only take the statements of the time as we find them. According to the accounts of contemporary writers, the Black Death swept away, within the space of four years, a fourth part of the population of Europe. Some towns in England are stated to have lost two-thirds of their inhabitants, and it is computed that one-half of the entire population of the country perished. Of the Sweating Sickness, Bacon says it “destroyed infinite persons;” Stowe “a wonderful number;” and other writers reckon the deaths in the places attacked by thousands. Similar representations are given of the ravages of the Plague, of the Petechial Fever, and even occasionally of Intermittent Fever; and the substantial correctness of these statements is confirmed by entries in parish registers still extant, which tell the story of the local outbreaks of those days with graphic and touching simplicity. During some of the worst of these visitations, contemporary writers concur in stating that the living were insufficient to bury the dead; business was suspended; the courts of law were closed; the churches were deserted for want of a sufficient number of clergy to perform the service; and ships were seen driving about on the ocean and drifting on shore, whose crews had perished to the last man. We can form no adequate conception of the terror inspired by these events. We have seen alarm in our own day, but then it bordered on maniacal despair. It seemed as if the last judgment had come upon the world, and men abandoned alike their possessions and their friends. The rich gave up their treasures and laid them at the foot of the altars; neighbour abandoned neighbour; parents their offspring, and brothers their sisters. “If” says one of the chroniclers, “in a circle of friends any one only by a single word happened to bring the plague to mind, first one and then another of the company was seized with a tormenting anguish; certain that they were attacked with a mortal sickness, they slunk away home, and there soon yielded up the ghost.”