Excerpt from Transactions of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec, Vol. 8: Session 1870-71 The plague had appeared at the close of 1664, and, though no new visitor, smote in the course of the following year the people of England, and especially of her capital, with a violence unknown before. Defoe, in the History of the Plague Year, shews death, with every accompaniment of pain and terror, stalking through the narrow streets of old London, and changing their busy hum into a silence broken only by the wailing of the mourners of fifty thousand dead by the woful denunciations and mad prayers of fanatics and by the madder yells of despairing profligttes. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.