A journal of the plague year, or, Memorials of the great pestilence in London, in 1665 / by Daniel De Foe.
- Daniel Defoe
- Date:
- 1835
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: A journal of the plague year, or, Memorials of the great pestilence in London, in 1665 / by Daniel De Foe. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.
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![i fell triumph of the grim king- of terrors ;—the last thrill of suffering humanity, sinking into the grave in wretchedness and despair. Except his inimitable Robinson Crusoe none of the productions of De Foe ever attained such a high degree of popular celebrity as his Journal of the Plague Year.,} The subject is one of the most fear- ful that can be met with in the annals of the human race; It connects itself, in a remarkable degree, with the ideas we entertain of an immediate Judgment of Heaven ; and it has been so treated by almost every serious writer, from the time of Moses, even to our own age *. That impression seems to have acted strongly upon the mind of De Foe ; and it has imparted a high moral character to his work which renders the interest it excites of ten-fold value, because it tends both to improve the heart and to inculcate the great lessons * In almost every age, and among even the most idolatrous nations, Pestilence has been regarded as an especial instrument of Divine anger; and it is probably with reference to the deep interest which this belief excites, in the generality of mankind, that both historians and poets have so often vied with each other in their gloomy details of its ravages. Neither war with all its pomp, nor the earthquake, nor the tempest in its overwhelming fury, has been more distinctly personified than the Pestilence that walketh in darkness.—It is with the description of a Plague that Homer begins his sublime poem; and the noblest of Grecian tragedies [the CEdipus Tyrannus of Sophocles,] is commenced in a similar manner : and in both cases, contagion is the immediate messenger of Heavenly wrath.—See Stebbing's Introduction to the Historyof the Plague Year. 1832.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21048721_0026.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
