182 • The Abysstalities than were the figures for these other diseases; many young children
succumbed either from the plague or from a breakdown of life-giving support
in their stricken family. Curiously, “grief ” carried away only three persons.
Everyone had to come to terms with the epidemic. Poets and artists found
a ready audience, just as Italian painters had in the wake of the Black Death
three centuries before.^5 Doggerel verses were more serious now than in the
previous winter, when the poetic friend of Thomas Rugge had made light of
the comets. The grim processions and gyrating skeletons printed from wood-
cuts during past great visitations now reappeared in broadsheets that kept
coming off the presses. They flooded the town despite the heavy mortality
among printers. New printings of Londons Lord Have Mercy Upon Usenumer-
ated plague burials and total burials down to the current week. In bold italic
type the typesetter added a “cheap medicine”: two cloves of garlic cut very
small in a pint of new milk. The optimistic advice—“drink it mornings fasting
and preserveth from infection”—may have been undercut by the tract’s illus-
trations of dead-carts and coffins. A doggerel verse ended stoically:
Oh where’s the vows we to our God have made!
When death & sickness come with axe and spade,
And hurl’d our Brethren up in heaps apace,
Even forty thousand in a little space:
The plague among us is not yet removed,
Because that sin of us is still beloved.
Each spectacle of Death and Funerall,
Puts thee and I in mind: We must die all.What were Londoners thinking as they mulled over these gloomy reflec-tions? Making his way up the river between the public fires on the sixth of
September, determined to keep an appointment with Albemarle, Samuel
Pepys could scarcely believe the scene. “Fires on each side of the Thames,” he
observed, “and strange to see in broad daylight two or three Burialls upon the
Bankeside, one at the very heels of another—doubtless all of the plague—
and yet at least 40 or 50 people going along with them.”^6 It must have
seemed like Dante’s inferno. In September the public began ignoring the
magistrates’ ban on funeral processions. People cried out for their rituals—
even if it meant spreading the plague among the mourners.