dreadful trade; and without some very great severity, I believe it will never be done; and yet till it is done we cannot pretend to take effectual measures in this nation for preventing the plague coming among us.

The physicians seem at present to fall in with the French methods, viz., of preventing the spreading of infection by surrounding the towns where it shall happen to be with troops of soldiers, cutting off all communication with the countries or parts of the country where such towns are that shall be infected. This Dr. Mead has been pleased to propose also in his treatise called "A Short Discourse.”

I must confess I do not see that this can be made practicable in England, and we see already it has not been effectual in France, notwithstanding greater severities have been used there than I presume will ever be allowed to be used here. For example, the plague began in Provence, in a part of the country the most easily separated from the rest of the world of any that can be singled out on their side, as will appear by the situation of the country. The south part of Provence, or, as some call it, the Lower Provence, is surrounded by water on three sides, and by the unpassable mountains of Piedmont and Nice on the fourth side; that is to say, it is bounded by the sea from the said mountains to the mouth of the great river Rhone, on the south; on the west it is bounded by the said river Rhone to the mouth of the Durance, on the south side of the district of Avignon; and on the north it is bounded by the said river Durance, to the mouth of the river

Verdon, and thence by the river Verdon to the foot of the said mountains of Piedmont.

On the south side, 't is allowed, there needed no guard, and the nature of the thing armed all the world from receiving any vessel coming from Provence, or suffering the people out of them to land; and if I am not misinformed, several people that did put to sea (as it were desperate from thence) are still missing, and it is believed have perished at sea, having not been allowed to set their feet on shore in any part of the world.

On the side of the river Rhone the west banks of the river have been so well guarded that nothing has been able to pass; and though the islands in the mouth of the Rhone have been infected, the distressed people of Arles, having almost by force gotten out among them at La Canourgue, Salon, and other places, yet the river being great and the navigation of it wholly stopped, the distemper has been kept off on that side.

On the east side also the mountains and the frontiers of Nice have been so well guarded by the troops of Piedmont, and the passes of those mountains are so few, so difficult, and so easy to be closed up, that very few of the people have attempted to escape that way, and those that have attempted it have been fired at and driven back, or if pressing forward have been killed.

But on the north side the case has been quite different, for the Durance and the Verdon are smaller rivers, and in many places fordable; so that in spite of all the guards placed in their lines, and the vigilance

of the patrols on the bank of the river, men have made their escape in the dark, and by private ways have gotten into the mountains, and from thence, being acquainted with the country, have passed on from place to place till they have found retreats, and have been received by their friends, and concealed as they desired. Some indeed have been discovered and have been driven back, and others have been killed; but certain it is, that among the many of these desperate people which have thus got away, some have been touched with the contagion-nay, some that perhaps have thought themselves sound and in health, and these have carried it with them to the places where they have made their retreat.

Thus a galley slave who made his escape from Marseilles, and, as it is said, reached to his brother's house at La Canourgue in the Gavandan, carried the plague with him; and thus it broke out at once one hundred and forty miles off Marseilles, and all the precautions, guards, lines, patrols, &c., used to prevent its coming out of the Nether Provinces, were at once defeated.

By the same accident it has spread itself in the Gavandan from one village to another, and from one town to another, till, as by the last account we are told, above an hundred villages and towns are visited in that part of the country, and the infection is spread into the Vivarais on one side, the diocese of Uzes on another, the province of Auvergne on a third, and into Rouergue on a fourth side, and yet at all these places the towns infected are immediately invested, and all communication with them cut off as soon

as it is known they are infected, and all the other regulations observed which are directed by the Government there.

This now is the effect of surrounding of towns with lines and with soldiers, and imprisoning the people against their will, forbidding the sound separating themselves from the sick, which they must needs take for an insufferable cruelty, and by which means they make the people desperate and mad. So that rather than stay in the place to be poisoned with the breath of dying people, and be certainly infected with the stench of bodies dead or sick of the plague, they venture at all hazards to make their escape, and, in effecting this, infect their friends; and thus it will be among us, I doubt not, if ever such methods are put in practice here.

Besides, as they can have no pretence to invest a town, or prohibit the inhabitants from quitting it, till it is infected, they put those inhabitants upon all possible means of concealing the infection when it is begun, till those who are in the secret of it can make their escape; and thus they travel securely with the distemper upon them, and emit the effluvia of infection wherever they come. Thus the city of Avignon was infected a month and seven days, viz., from the 17th of August to the 23rd of September, before it was publicly known in the country round; so that people went freely into the city from all the villages about Avignon, and the citizens went freely out into the country, and the distemper was fetched by one and carried by the other, without any precaution to all the neighbouring towns for several

leagues round the place, several of which towns are more fatally touched with the contagion than the city itself, as Bedarrides and Sorgues on the north, Barbantine on the south, and even at length the city of Orange itself; and now they are obliged to quit the old lines and post on the bank of the river Durance, and to draw a new line near a hundred miles in length, to wit, from St. Paul Trois Châteaux on the Rhone to Montbron east, and from thence down to Lauris on the Durance on the south, and so on the bank of that river to its fall into the Rhone west; and yet all these lines seem not to be capable to effect the thing proposed by them, for when the inhabitants are thus made desperate by locking up the sound with the sick, they do and will find ways to escape, whatever hazards it may be to themselves or others.

Whereas, if the people were left at their liberty, except as was practised here in the time of the last visitation, viz., by shutting up houses known to be infected, I say, if the people were left at liberty, those that did flee at all, would flee because they were infected, and thereby save their lives, and likewise not carry the distemper with them when they went.

In the next place, the cutting off of the communication of one part of the country with another in England would be such a general interruption of trade, that it would entirely ruin the countries and towns so cut off, and the people would be very tumultuous and uneasy upon that head.

It seems to me a much more rational method, that as soon as any town or village appears to be