Loimographia : an account of the great plague of London in the year 1665 / by William Boghurst... edited by Joseph Frank Payne.

  • Boghurst, William, 1631-1685.
Date:
MDCCCXCIV [1894]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Loimographia : an account of the great plague of London in the year 1665 / by William Boghurst... edited by Joseph Frank Payne. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

    34/134 (page 6)
    recorded by Eusebius in his 37th booke, Cap. 22. He tells us it fell promiscuously upon the Heathen and the Christians, though most heavily upon the former, that noe house was free from the dire effects of its rage. In other parts of Affrique wee understand from St. Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage, in his excellent sermon de Morialitate, made on purpose to animate and strengthen the Christians who now joynt and fellow-sufferers with the Heathens undc prmsentis mortcditatis copia, as hee tearmes it, large measure of the then raortallity proceeded. And of its rage at Rome, wee find observed out of the Eoman History by Calvisius that there dyed of it dayly to the number of five thousand, and therefore Brightman and Mead, both men sufficiently learned, in their Coramentaryes upon the Eevelations interpret the plague to bee one of thefearfullJudgments foretold tobreake forth upon the opening of the fourth Seale (Eev., Chap, vi, 8). And Justus Lipsius, a Critick of noe ordinary reading, saith of this Pestilence in his book de Constantia, lib. 2, non alia nun- quam major Ives, etc., that his reading did not afford him an example or precedent of a greater plague considering the many countries it infested or the severall yeares that it lasted. The third vmiversall Plague was that which happened in the Eaigne of Justinian and tooke its beginning in the yeare of Christ 532, and this also as the former is sayd to have descended from Ethiopia. We have a copious de- scription of it by Procopius in his Persicorum, lib. 2, and wee are informed by him that it raged very much in Byzantium or Constantinople for three months space, and that when it was in its height there dyed of it every day ten thousands and upwards; and this is the Pestilence related by Evagrius the Ecclesiastical Historian in his 4th booke, chap. 28, which lasted as he sayes 52 yeares, not continuall but by severall returnes and revolutions, and of this Pestilence hee was sicke himselfe, and had a rising in his groins. And Greece shared not only in the contagion of it, but also Italy, as wee reade in Paulus Diaconus, and it swept away Pope Pelagius, the pre- decessor of Gregory the Create, about the yeare 580, for I conceive this Plague to bee that in the raigne of Justinian propagated into remoter Countryes and lengthened out to this terme much according to the forementioned computation of Evagrius. It also overran France in the yeare 583 and robbed King Chilpericke of two sonnes, and Guntheraund, King of another part of France, of his wife (see Calvisius in the year 583). And this I conclude to bee that which plagued the Britaines here in that vacation betwixt the