Fiacre

“ In the first place, the pestilential disease, or plague, seized upon the city, and ate up all the flower and prime of their youth and strength. Upon occasion of which, the people, distempered and afflicted in their souls, as well as in their bodies, were utterly enraged like madmen against Pericles, and, like patients grown delirious, sought to lay violent hands on their physician, or, as it were, their father. ”

“ Still it was not absolutely the plague; the use of the word was prohibited, it was a pestilential fever, the adjective was preferred to the substantive,—then, not the true plague,—that is to say, the plague, but only in a certain sense,—and further, combined with poison and witchcraft. Such is the absurd trifling with which men seek to blind themselves, wilfully abstaining from a sound exercise of judgment to arrive at the truth. ”

“ One of those dread evils which spread terror far and wide, and which Heaven, in its anger, ordains for the punishment of wickedness upon earth—a plague in fact; and so dire a one as to make rich in one day that grim ferryman who takes a coin from all who cross the river Acheron to the land of the dead—such a plague was once waging war against the animals. ”

“ Needless to say I refer to the outbreak of the plague among us, that terrible pestilence which swept Europe from end to end, depopulated its greatest cities, filled every burial-place to overflowing, and caused such misery and desolation in all ranks of life as has never before been known among us. Few homes were there, even in this fair England of ours, but suffered some bereavement; few families but mourn a loss the wound of which has even now barely healed. And it is my part in this dreadful business that I have forced myself with so much bitter humiliation to relate. ”

“ That blister and that scab, of which you do not know the cause, have to come, either by the corruption of the enemies which these little giants have slain, or by the plague produced by the remnants of the food with which the disturbers have gorged themselves, and left in heaps of dead bodies on the field; or because the tyrant, after having driven from around himself his companions which were corking with their bodies the pores of ours, has given passage to the humor, which has become corrupt after having been ejected from the sphere of the circulation of our blood. ”

“ The Plague will come and come swiftly, but it shall not touch thee; many shall die in their sins; thou shalt live on with thine. A brute thou art, and with brutes thou shalt herd; thou shalt howl as a ravening wolf, and as such men shall hunt thee from their doors. Thou shalt seek death, even as Cain sought and found it not, because of the mark of the Lord. ”

“ The dead among the poor were flung into common pits, whither their bearers had often to be flung after them; and while the wives and children of the rich sat wailing round the funeral pyres, they were often swept off by the same disease, and burnt in the same flames. Senators and knights fell victims to the plague no less than paupers; but their fate was less pitied, for it seemed less sad to pay the common debt of mortality than to perish by imperial cruelty. In that pestilence thirty thousand perished in Rome alone. ”

“ I shall grind them to powder, and strew their dust upon the air. There shall be a spy in every man's house, a traitor on every hearth, a hangman in every village, a gibbet in every square. Plague, leprosy, or fever shall be less deadly than my wrath ”

“ In that case, there is an unnatural infection, a pestilential taint, fermenting in the constitution of society, which fever and convulsions of some kind or other must throw off, or in which the vital powers, worsted in an unequal struggle, are pushed back upon themselves, and, by a reversal of their whole functions, fester to gangrene, to death,—and instead of what was but just now the delight and boast of the creation, there will be cast out in the face of the sun a bloated, putrid, noisome carcass, full of stench and poison, an offence, a horror, a lesson to the world. ”

“ France, where, under the fearful reign of Louis XI., oppression and misery seemed to mock the gifts of heaven, became in 1482, after a two 189years’ scarcity, the scene of a devastating plague. It was an inflammatory fever with delirium, accompanied by such intense pain in the head, that many dashed out their brains against the wall, or rushed into the water; while others, after incessantly running to and fro, died in a state of the greatest agony. ”

“ As soon as the pestilence appeared on the continent, horrifying accounts of the unheard-of sufferings of those affected, and the certainty of their death, passed like wild-fire from mouth to mouth. Men’s minds were paralysed with terror, and the imagination exaggerated the calamity, which seemed to have come upon them like a last judgment. The English Sweating Sickness was the theme of discourse everywhere, and if any one happened to be taken ill of fever, no matter of what kind, it was immediately converted into this demon, whose spectre form continually haunted the oppressed spirit. ”

“ He and his guards and Priests; but Plague did fling
One shadow upon all. Famine can smile
On him who brings it food, and pass, with guile
Of thankful falsehood, like a courtier gray,
The house-dog of the throne; but many a mile
Comes Plague, a wingèd wolf, who loathes alway
The garbage and the scum that strangers make her prey. ”

“ But what is the root of this great evil? Where lies the fearful secret? Who understands the disease? A direful pestilence is in the air—it walketh in darkness, and wasteth at noonday. It is slaying the first-born in our houses, and the cry of anguish is swelling on every gale. ”

“ Until the plague hath had its work in him,
Killing the nerves which die before the life;
Then, when his strings have cracked with agony
And all his bones are empty of the sense
To ache, the plague will quit and light elsewhere.
Oh, sir! it is not good to hold him so! ”

“ The priests looked with horror on the fatal sign; and the stricken king, himself horrified at this awful visitation of God, ceased to resist the priests, and rushed forth to relieve the Temple of his unclean presence, and to linger out the sad remnant of his days in the living death of that most dishonouring disease. Surely no man was ever smitten down from the summits of splendour to a lower abyss of unspeakable calamity! We can but trust that the misery only laid waste the few last years of his reign ”

“ For this plague is already beginning amongst us, and there is none to take the Censer, and to stand between the living and the dead, that we be not consumed as in a moment; for there is wrath gone out from the Lord. ”

“ But contemplating, for instance, that horrid pestilence, the Plague,—the thought has sometimes presented itself, whether there might not be some relation between that fearful pestilence and a state of general moral impurity. It is known that the Plague is continually to be found in Oriental countries, where the institution of polygamy exists, and a consequent sphere of unchasteness must prevail. Looking, too, at some of the periods when it has extended itself over Europe, or particular countries of it, does not history show the existence of a similar state of moral corruption? ”

“ Still recurring scenes of misery and pain, the fruits of this distemper, made no more a part of our lives—the word plague no longer rung in our ears—the aspect of plague incarnate in the human countenance no longer appeared before our eyes. From this moment I saw plague no more. She abdicated her throne, and despoiled herself of her imperial sceptre among the ice rocks that surrounded us. ”

“ Having thus thrown himself into the midst of the contagion, it was truly wonderful that he never was attacked by it.
In seasons of public calamity, when confusion takes the place of order, we often behold a display of the sublimest virtue, but more frequently, alas! an increase of vice and crime. Instances of the latter were not wanting during the present unhappy period. The profligate, spared by the plague, found in the common confusion, and in the slackening of the restraints of law, new occasions for mischief, and new assurances of impunity. ”

“ Epidemic convulsions prevailed in Scotland, half a century later. Multitudes, under pungent preaching, were violently agitated, uttering loud cries, shaking, trembling, bleeding at the nose, the minister promoting the uproar by urging them not to stifle their convictions. The shriek, or the shout, it is stated, never rose from one, but that others joined the outcry. ”

“ When Phison has rule over the places, famine, distress and affliction come to pass in that part of the world, for miserly is the array of these angels. And in like manner in each of the quarters according to the nature and power of each, come evil times and troops of diseases. And evermore the flow of evil according to the rule of the quarters, as if they were rivers, by the will of Edem goes unceasingly about the world. ”

“ This ceremony was supposed to rid the people of the evils by which they were beset, or according to a somewhat different interpretation it redeemed them by paying the debt they owed to the sea-god. As practised by the Greeks of Asia Minor in the sixth century before our era, the custom of the scapegoat was as follows. When a city suffered from plague, famine, or other public calamity, an ugly or deformed person was chosen to take upon himself all the evils which afflicted the community. ”

“ Pass from these innumerable theatres of carnage to the equally unnumbered retreats of sorrow that cover the earth, to that swarm of diseases which slowly devour so many poor wretches while they yet live; think of that frightful ravage of nature which poisons the human race in its source, and associates the most abominable of plagues with the most necessary of pleasures. See that despised king Henry III., and that mediocre leader the Duke of Mayenne, struck down with the small-pox while they are waging civil war ”

“ To pursue the course of the destroyer from house to house—to show with what unrelenting fury he assailed his victims—to describe their sufferings—to number the dead left within their beds, thrown into the streets, or conveyed to the plague-pits—would be to present a narrative as painful as revolting. ”

“ There shall no evil come to thee, nor shall the scourge come near thy dwelling." But above all let us attend to what generally engages peoples minds during a plague, namely, to keep from our consciences the plague of the soul sin, the fuel of all evil lest the divine anger should be aroused and punish us by another pestilence of the body. ”

“ And as from coffers in the old Egyptian tombs, the live plague can still rush forth and slay, the long-imprisoned evils rushed forth upon the fair earth and on the human beings who lived on it—malignant, ruthless, fierce, treacherous, and cruel—poisoning, slaying, devouring. ”

“ In many a house the watchmen, in their rounds, found a whole family of corpses, father, mother, and children, side by side, for a disorder called the plague, naturally engendered of hardship and famine, now came, as if in kindness, to abridge the agony of the people. ”

“ They had been possessed, by his enemies, with the belief that the occasion of the plague was the crowding of the country people together into the town, forced as they were now, in the heat of the summer-weather, to dwell many of them together even as they could, in small tenements and stifling hovels, and to be tied to a lazy course of life within doors, whereas before they lived in a pure, open, and free air. ”

“ The Mortality which for some Days past has extremely increas'd, the Malignity and Violence with which it begins to rage in all Parts without Distinction, and the Suddenness with which it is observ'd to communicate it self imperceptibly, has already convinced the most obstinate, and those who were most disposed to deceive themselves, that it is really the Plague; and without waiting to hear or reason any longer, every one runs away so precipitately, that all the Gates of the Town are hardly sufficient to let out the Crowds. ”

“ Then there broke in my old and faithful servant, and the wind flapped down upon us from the sky. I heard his voice calling through the noise, his thin hands gesticulating in the air; and at his words I stood struck dumb and cold.
'No help!' he cried, 'no help! Nothing will avail now. The plague has taken the very servant on his errand,' he moaned; 'the plague! ”

“ Before they could recover from the effects of the great plagues of the fourteenth century the civil disturbances of the fifteenth century intensified the evils from which they were suffering, and became to them "specially disastrous." ”

“ As the unseen pestilence sweeps through the atmosphere, from one nation to another, so will a moral plague, like the delusion of witchcraft, enchain the minds of a Christian community, and spread death and devastation before it. ”

“ They’ll surely kill him, doctor!”
“God grant they may!” the doctor thought, but what he said was:
“The quicker he goes, then, the better.”
“But isn’t there any way to bring him to reason, doctor? To make him like other men? To save him?”
“I see none,” Filhiol answered. He pondered a moment while the rain-drums rolled their tattoos on the roof of the porch and the sea thundered. “The curse, the real curse on that boy, is his unbridled temper, his gorilla-like strength. His strength has unsettled his judgment and his will. Ordinary men rely on their brains, and have to be decent. ”

“ The Grand-Duchess of somewhere did something, or didn't do it—I forget which—that was or was not "due to her." I wish you saw the consternation of the town at the tidings. If it was the plague was announced, the state of distraction would have been less.
You would n't believe me if I told you how they took it to heart. Old generals with white moustaches, fat, elderly gentlemen in counting-bouses, grave shopkeepers, and grim-looking clerks in the Excise went about as if they had lost their father, and fallen suddenly into diminished circumstances. ”