stories of these old pestilences, when the first panic terror has
past, become, however tragical, still beautiful and heroic; and we
read of noble-hearted men and women palliating ruin which they
could not cure, braving dangers which seemed to them miraculous,
from which they were utterly defenceless, spending money, time,
and, after all, life itself upon sufferers from whom they might
without shame have fled.

They are very cheering, the stories of the old city pestilences;
and the nobleness which they brought out in the heart of many a
townsman who had seemed absorbed in the lust of gain--who perhaps
had been really absorbed in it--till that fearful hour awakened in
him his better self, and taught him, not self-aggrandisement, but
self-sacrifice; begetting in him, out of the very depth of
darkness, new and divine light. That nobleness, doubt it not,
exists as ever in the hearts of citizens. May God grant us to see
the day when it shall awaken to exert itself, not for the
palliation, not even for the cure, but for the prevention, yea,
the utter extermination, of pestilence.

About the middle of the sixteenth century, as far as I can
ascertain, another and even more painful phenomenon appears in our
great cities--a dangerous class. How it arose is not yet clear.
That the Reformation had something to do with the matter, we can
hardly doubt. At the dissolution of the monasteries, the more
idle, ignorant, and profligate members of the mendicant orders,
unable to live any longer on the alms of the public, sunk,
probably, into vicious penury. The frightful misgovernment of
this country during the minority of Edward the Sixth, especially
the conversion of tilled lands into pasture, had probably the