TABLE OF DEATHS BY PLAGUE, IN THE YEAR 1665-1666. The subjoined TABLE, which has been drawn up from Original documents in the possession of the Company of Parish Clerks, and is now first printed, will show the weekly returns of Deaths by Plague, from the 19th of December 1665 to the 18th of December 1666. During the confusion occasioned by the Great Fire in September, 1666, the accounts for three weeks were merged into one total. MEMOIRS ОР THE PLAGUE. Ir was about the beginning of September, 1664, that I, among the rest of my neighbours, heard, in ordinary discourse, that the Plague was returned again in Holland; for it had been very violent there, and particularly at Amsterdam and Rotterdam, in the year 1663, whither they say it was brought, some said from Italy, others from the Levant, among some goods which were brought home by their Turkey fleet; others said it was brought from Candia; others, from Cyprus. It mattered not from whence it came; but all agreed it was come into Holland again.* We had no such thing as printed newspapers in those *In Pepys's "Diary," (vol. ii. pp. 105, 111, under the dates of October 19th, and 30th, 1663,) are the following early notices of the approaching Pestilence "To the Coffee-house in Cornhill, where much talk about the Turkes proceedings, and that the Plague is got to Amsterdam, brought by a ship from Argier, and it is also carried to Hambrough."'The Plague is much in Amsterdam, and we in fear of it here, which God defend." During the following month, the Infection continued to spread in both the above places, and all ships coming thence to England were enjoined by an Order of Council to perform a "Quarantine" of thirty days in Hole-haven. On the 16th of June, 1664, Pepys wrote:-"The talk upon the 'Change is, that De Ruyter is dead, with fifty men of his own ship, of the Plague at Cales." This report, as far as regarded De Ruyter, was not correct: that intrepid commander survived until April 1676. when he was mortally wounded by a canon-shot, in an engagemeri B |