I know that the inhabitants of the towns adjacent to London were much blamed for cruelty to the poor people that ran from the contagion in their distress, and many very severe things were done, as may be seen from what has been said; but I cannot but say also, that where there was room for charity and assistance to the people, without apparent danger to themselves, they were willing enough to help and relieve them.  But as every town were indeed judges in their own case, so the poor people who ran abroad in their extremities were often ill used, and driven back again into the town; and this caused infinite exclamations and outcries against the country towns, and made the clamor very popular.

And yet more or less, maugre[228] all the caution, there was not a town of any note within ten (or, I believe, twenty) miles of the city, but what was more or less infected, and had some[229] died among them.  I have heard the accounts of several, such as they were reckoned up, as follows:—­

Enfield                   32
Hornsey                   58
Newington                 17
Tottenham                 42
Edmonton                  19
Barnet and Hadley         43
St. Albans               121
Watford                   45
Uxbridge                 117
Hertford                  90
Ware                     160
Hodsdon                   30
Waltham Abbey             23
Epping                    26
Deptford                 623
Greenwich                631
Eltham and Lusum          85
Croydon                   61
Brentwood                 70
Rumford                  109
Barking            about 200
Brandford                432
Kingston                 122
Staines                   82
Chertsey                  18
Windsor                  103
cum aliis.[230]

Another thing might render the country more strict with respect to the citizens, and especially with respect to the poor, and this was what I hinted at before; namely, that there was a seeming propensity, or a wicked inclination, in those that were infected, to infect others.

There have been great debates among our physicians as to the reason of this.  Some will have it to be in the nature of the disease, and that it impresses every one that is seized upon by it with a kind of rage and a hatred against their own kind, as if there were a malignity, not only in the distemper to communicate itself, but in the very nature of man, prompting him with evil will, or an evil eye, that as they say in the case of a mad dog, who, though the gentlest creature before of any of his kind, yet then will fly upon and bite any one that comes next him, and those as soon as any, who have been most observed[231] by him before.

Others placed it to the account of the corruption of human nature, who[232] cannot bear to see itself more miserable than others of its own species, and has a kind of involuntary wish that all men were as unhappy or in as bad a condition as itself.