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1551.] to offer a premium on the debasement of all the pure shillings and groats which remained in the realm. The council saw half the truth, but unhappily only half. They undertook to set the presses at work coining silver at a pure standard; an honest shilling was to be given at the mints for every two testons, and the alloy, it was thought, would pay the cost of the stamping. But from ignorance, carelessness, or some less worthy motive, men were left to their own discretion either to bring in their money or leave it circulating at its new rate; and those who held the old coin found more advantage in exporting it as bullion, or in melting it down to the level of the lowest recent issues, in which a third or a fourth part only was pure silver. Thus the people lost their money, and prices, nevertheless, would not subside. The council abstained from further peculation. That was the extent of the amendment.

To increase the misery of the summer, there reappeared, in July, the strange and peculiar plague of the English nation. The sweating sickness, the most mortal of all forms of pestilence which have ever appeared in this country, selected its victims exclusively from among the natives of Great Britain. If it broke out in a foreign town, it picked out the English residents with undeviating accuracy. The sufferers were in general men between thirty and forty, and the stoutest and the healthiest most readily caught the infection. The symptoms were a sudden perspiration,