Not a single French inhabitant[743] of the neighbouring town of Calais was affected, and neither the Scotch inhabitants of the same island, nor the Irish, were visited by the Sweating Sickness, so that we cannot get rid of the notion, that there was some peculiarity in the whole constitution of the English which rendered them exclusively susceptible of this disease. To make this out accurately would be so much the more difficult, because, in the original year of the Sweating Sickness, foreigners were the very persons among whom the English disease broke out; and again, because English persons who had lived a year in France, on their return home in the summer of 1551, became the subjects of Sweating Sickness[744]. Contemporaries, indeed, find a cause in the gluttony and rude mode of life of the English. In short, in all those remote causes with which we have already become acquainted, and which, doubtless, also had their part in preparing the same scourge for the Germans and Flemings in 1529. Kaye, the most efficient eye-witness, even brings in proof of this view, that the temperate in England remained exempt from the Sweating Sickness, and on the contrary, that some Frenchmen at Calais, who were too much devoted to English manners, were seized with it[745]. To this alone, however, this susceptibility cannot be attributed, unless we would be content with the antiquated system of giving too much weight to remote causes, opposed to which we are met by the striking fact, that the Germans and Netherlanders, who had scarcely much improved in their manners since 1529, were not again visited by their old enemy. SECT. 3.—CAUSES.—NATURAL PHENOMENA. It is easy to perceive, or rather we have no alternative but to suppose, an unknown something in the English atmosphere, which imparted to the inhabitants the rheumatic diathesis, or, if we will, so penetrated their bodies, overcharged as they were with crude juices[746], that their constitutions had the so-called _opportunity_, that is, were changed in such a manner as to fit them for the reception of the Sweating Sickness. Under such a condition, the common and more peculiar causes of this disease were not absolutely necessary, in order to induce its attack in a constitution thus long prepared for it, but the general causes of disease were sufficient of themselves to give it its last stimulus, although this should be in an entirely different climate, as in the present instance was the case with the English who were living in Spain, and with the Venetian ambassador _Naugerio_, who, in the year 1528, fell ill of the petechial fever, when far from Italy, and living in France[747].