Hamburgh was the first place on the continent in which the Sweating Sickness broke out. Men’s minds were still in great excitement there in consequence of the events of the few preceding months. The Protestants had, after long and stormy contests, at length vanquished the Papists. Under the wise direction of _Bugenhagen_ the great work of Reformation was just completed. The monasteries were abolished, the monks dismissed, schools were established, and peace again returned with the enjoyment of ecclesiastical freedom. Just at this moment[572] the dreaded pestilence, of which wonderful accounts had been so long and so often heard, unexpectedly made its appearance. It immediately excited, as it had ever done in England, general dismay, and before any instructions as to its treatment could be obtained, either from the English or from Germans who had been in England, it destroyed daily from forty to sixty, and altogether, within the space of twenty-two days[573], about 1100 inhabitants, for such was the number of coffins which were at this time manufactured by the undertakers. The duration of _the great mortality_, for thus we would designate the more violent raging of this pestilence, was, however, much shorter, and may be roughly estimated at about nine days, for from the fragment of a letter received from Hamburgh, which was dispatched to Wittenberg on the 8th of August, by a person who was at that time burgomaster, it appears that, for some days past, no one had died of the Sweating Fever, excepting one or two drunkards, and that the citizens were then beginning to take breath again. We may thus judge, from the unauthenticated account here mentioned, that the disease lasted about a fortnight longer, and that the loss of lives amounted to 2000. At all events, however, the pestilence manifested itself on the continent with the same malignity which was peculiar to it from the first, and if the assertion made at a distance respecting the mortality in Hamburgh, were overcharged[574], yet there certainly existed sufficient foundation for exaggerations of this sort, which are never wanting in times of such great danger. The historians of this, even at that time, powerful and civilized commercial town, have on the whole said but little regarding this important event—a circumstance easily explicable from the constant occupation of men’s minds in religious affairs, and from the well known short visitation of the epidemic, which, like a transient meteor, needed quick and cautious observation if any valuable information respecting the occurrence was to be transmitted to posterity. Some particulars of its first origin have, however, been preserved amid a mass of general assertions which convey no information. Thus it appears that the Sweating Sickness did not show itself in the town until a Captain Hermann Evers, just about the time mentioned, (the 25th of July,) returned from England, bringing on board with him a number of