Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 5.djvu/36

16 accompanied with faintness and drowsiness. Those who were taken with full stomachs died immediately. Those who caught cold shivered into dissolution in a few hours. Those who yielded to the intense temptation to sleep, though but for a quarter of an hour, awoke only to die; and so rapid was the operation of the disorder that, of seven householders who one night supped together in the city of London, six before morning were corpses. 'The only remedy was to be kept close with moderate air, and to drink posset ale or such like for thirty hours, and then the danger was passed.' 'It was a terrible time,' says Stow. 'Men lost their friends by the sweat, and their money by the proclamation.' In London alone eight hundred men died in one week in July.

Visitations of pestilence in Christian countries have ever operated as a call to repentance. The effect upon the English was heightened by the singularity which confined the attack to themselves. The council, in an address of profound solemnity, invited the nation to acknowledge humbly the merited chastisements of Heaven: it was not the first time, as it will not be the last, that men have been keen-eyed to detect in others their own faults, and to call upon the world to repent of them.

The bishops were charged to invite all men to be more diligent in prayer, and less anxious for their personal interests; especially to refrain their greedy appetites from that insatiable serpent of