as was the plague; but the other foretold a stroke, sudden, swift, and
fiery as the conflagration. Nay, so particular some people were, that as
they looked upon that comet preceding the fire, they fancied that they
not only saw it pass swiftly and fiercely, and could perceive the motion
with their eye, but even they heard it; that it made a rushing,
mighty noise, fierce and terrible, though at a distance, and but just
perceivable.

I saw both these stars, and, I must confess, had so much of the common
notion of such things in my head, that I was apt to look upon them as
the forerunners and warnings of God's judgements; and especially when,
after the plague had followed the first, I yet saw another of the like
kind, I could not but say God had not yet sufficiently scourged the
city.

But I could not at the same time carry these things to the height
that others did, knowing, too, that natural causes are assigned by
the astronomers for such things, and that their motions and even their
revolutions are calculated, or pretended to be calculated, so that they
cannot be so perfectly called the forerunners or foretellers, much less
the procurers, of such events as pestilence, war, fire, and the like.

But let my thoughts and the thoughts of the philosophers be, or have
been, what they will, these things had a more than ordinary influence
upon the minds of the common people, and they had almost universal
melancholy apprehensions of some dreadful calamity and judgement coming
upon the city; and this principally from the sight of this comet, and
the little alarm that was given in December by two people dying at St
Giles's, as above.