Every Reader’s Dryden

 

This is the seventeenth in the Every Reader’s Poets series, essays meant to introduce (or re-introduce) non-scholarly readers to the work of important poets. In these I limit my focus to the discussion of only a few of each writer’s best-known works while providing a bit of context and biography, eschewing most byways and all footnotes. A general introduction “Why Read Poetry?” is also posted on this site.  For a complete list, see section 5G of the Index which is always posted among the current month’s essays in the archive on the right of the page. 

 

 

     John Dryden dominated the literary scene of his day.  He was the first poet laureate officially named by the crown (in spite of his youthful adherence to Cromwell’s Protectorate) and he, along with Pope, somewhat later, exemplified the era’s neo-Classical taste.  Like Shakespeare he had a financial interest in a theater, the King’s Company, for which he agreed to produce three plays a year, and he supported himself for decades with income from the stage, composing twenty-nine plays, both comedies and tragedies, once popular, but rarely performed today.  His theatrical reputation  is not aided by the fact that he took it upon himself to improve a number of Shakespeare’s plays. 

     He wrote important critical works such as An Essay of Dramatick Poesy and The Art of Satire as well as doing significant work in translation, producing versions of Vergil, Persius, Juvenal, Ovid, Lucretius, and Homer that were widely read and praised.

      Though  he once magisterially dictated taste, as literary standards evolved the appeal  of his own poetry diminished considerably.  A couple of generations after his death, Samuel Johnson, an excellent critic, anticipated many readers since when he found Dryden “not often pathetick,” with little skill in “exhibiting the genuine operations of the heart,” a poet more “of strong reason than quick sensibility.”  This impression has since strengthened, magnified by the Romantic prejudices many literati retain that view his sensibility as lacking in passion, and his style as pedantic and artificial. 

     In addition, the intellectual controversies, political and artistic, that excited his day now arouse only antiquarian interest, and many of his strongest works are long polemical poems that today require a quantity of footnotes intolerable for impatient twenty-first century readers.  The satires for which he is best-known represent a genre almost altogether absent in today’s poetry.

     When Dryden was writing, readers relished lengthy symbolic exercises in wit, even when these were composed in poetry, fueling constant sallies back and forth between controversialists with every exchange sold to the public in what are called “pamphlet wars.”  The topics might be political, theological, or  aesthetic.  Late seventeenth century authors could depend on the common reader’s familiarity with Classical literature, since Greek and Latin were fundamental to the educational system until quite recently.  Most of today’s readers know little either of Dryden’s topical interests or his Classical lore.

     Though the passing of centuries and the variation in taste may have made some of Dryden’s poetry an acquired taste, his masterful skill can still impress and even amuse a modern reader.  One piece that requires no annotation is a passage from Dryden’s translation of Book IV of Lucretius dealing with sexual positions, often reprinted under the title “The Posture.” 

 

Of like importance is the posture too,

In which the genial feat of Love we do:

For as the females of the four foot kind,

Receive the leapings of their Males behind;

So the good Wives, with loins uplifted high,

And leaning on their hands the fruitful stroke may try:

For in that posture will they best conceive:

Not when supinely laid they frisk and heave;

For active motions only break the blow,

And more of Strumpets than of Wives they show;

When answering stroke with stroke, the mingled liquors flow.

Endearments eager, and too brisk a bound,

Throws off the Plow-share from the furrow’d ground.

But common Harlots in conjunction heave,

Because ’tis less their business to conceive

Than to delight, and to provoke the deed;

A trick which honest Wives but little need.

 

     The notion of Dryden as Dryasdust is hardly compatible with this bit of advice in spite of its Latin source.  Lucretius maintains that making love face to face is typical of “Strumpets,” as it is said to be less likely to lead to conception than when women “Receive the leapings of their Males behind,” making this the appropriate position for married couples.  The putative interest in family planning covers an explicitly lubricious tone (“leapings,” “frisk and heave,” “mingled liquors”) as the artfully turned couplets tumble one after another toward the passage’s conclusion.  Its wit does not suffer from the fact that the reader may well think that even “honest Wives” may wish to employ “delight,” for their own sake as well as for their mates. 

     The background rhythm of iambic pentameter allows subtle variations to contribute significant sound effects.  For instance, the extra syllable in “genial” sounds like a grace note celebrating the joys of the bed.  The extra foot in “And leaning on their hands the fruitful stroke may try” recalls in sonic cadence the physical movements of love-making.  (The device occurs again a few lines later in “When answering stroke with stroke, the mingled liquors flow, where again the prolongation is palpable.)

     Absalom and Achitophel, a satire of over a thousand lines, is a prominent example of Dryden’s topical work, today much praised by specialists and little scanned by anyone else.  Readers wishing to understand the poem today must not only be more familiar than most moderns with the story from Samuel II of Absalom’s ill-considered rebellion against David, but also with the details of the Exclusion Crisis of 1679-1681 when some parliamentarians sought to exclude Charles II’s brother James from succession because of his Roman Catholicism.  The bills failed and James took the throne only to be deposed (after suspending Parliament and ruling for three years by decree) in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. 

    Understanding Dryden’s own politics is complicated by the fact that, when the Protectorate was in the ascendance, he worked for Cromwell’s government (as Milton and Marvell did) and wrote “Heroic Stanzas on the Death of Oliver Cromwell” in the praise of its leader in which he depicted the overthrow of Charles I as the founding of a new and better age.  Yet after the Restoration he scrambled to praise Charles II with equal enthusiasm. 

     Perhaps he was primarily a defender of the status quo. In one passage from Absalom and Achitophel he argues that any socio-political change will be for the worse, and therefore defends reaction as a general principle. 

 

If they may Give and Take when e'r they please,

Not Kings alone, (the Godheads Images,)

But Government it self at length must fall

To Natures state; where all have Right to all.

Yet, grant our Lords the People Kings can make,

What Prudent men a setled Throne would shake?

For whatsoe'r their Sufferings were before,

That Change they Covet makes them suffer more.

All other Errors but disturb a State,

But Innovation is the Blow of Fate.

If ancient Fabricks nod, and threat to fall,

To Patch the Flows, and Buttress up the Wall,

Thus far 'tis Duty; but here fix the Mark:

For all beyond it is to touch our Ark.

To change Foundations, cast the Frame anew,

Is work for Rebels who base Ends pursue:

At once Divine and Humane Laws controul;

And mend the Parts by ruine of the Whole.

The Tampering World is subject to this Curse,

To Physick their Disease into a worse.

 

     Thus, while no moralistic pedant, he was definitely conservative politically.  One must imagine a vision of an ignorant mob behind the “they” of the first line of this passage describing those who wish to arbitrarily alter the order of things, though in doing so they are very nearly blasphemous (as the king is the “image” of Godhead).  Radicals are, like Lucifer, rebels against both “Divine and Humane Laws.”   For some this preference for avoiding change is an adequate explanation of his shifting loyalties, and the fear of disorder conveniently conflates with a writer’s appeals for the patronage of the powerful.  The image of reformers as quack doctors who increase rather than relieve suffering must have had resonance for seventeenth century patients.

     A passage from the mock-heroic epic Mac Flecknoe exemplifies Dryden’s vituperative polemical style.  The entire work is devoted to ridiculing Thomas Shadwell, a rival playwright and political opponent whom Dryden considers the Emperor of “all the realms of Non-sense.”   The tone of the work is suggested by the fact that Dryden, by suppressing Shadwell’s name and writing instead “Sh----,” a convention that allows the reader to take the word to be shit as in “But loads of Sh—— almost choakt the way.”  In the following passage Dryden describes the devolution of drama since Elizabethan times, paralleled by the decline in a neighborhood which once included defensive fortifications implying an age of heroism, but which has since become a red-light district.  “Augusta” in  the first line is simply a name for London.  

 

Close to the walls which fair Augusta bind,

(The fair Augusta much to fears inclin’d)

An ancient fabrick, rais’d t’inform the sight,

There stood of yore, and Barbican it hight:

A watch Tower once; but now, so fate ordains,

Of all the pile an empty name remains.

From its old Ruins Brothel-houses rise,

Scenes of lewd loves, and of polluted joys.

Where their vast Courts, the Mother-Strumpets keep,

And, undisturb’d by Watch, in silence sleep.

Near these a Nursery erects its head,

Where queens are form’d, and future heroes bred;

Where unfledg’d actors learn to laugh and cry,

Where infant punks their tender voices try,

And little Maximins the gods defy.

Great Fletcher never treads in buskins here,

Nor greater Jonson dares in socks appear;

But gentle Simkin just reception finds

Amidst this Monument of vanisht minds:

Pure Clinches, the suburbian Muse affords;

And Panton waging harmless war with words.

Here Flecknoe, as a place to fame well known,

Ambitiously design’d his Sh—–‘s throne.

 

     In this scene the urban decay is apparent in the “Ruins” of old buildings, moral decline in the proliferation of prostitution, and aesthetic weakness in the popularity of clownish characters like Simkin and Panton.  The scene is for Dryden a “Monument of vanish’d minds.” 

     A song from one of Dryden’s plays provides relief from the rolling pentameters of the preceding three poems.   This piece from Marriage à la Mode was popular enough to have been included in the 1673 book Choice Songs and Ayres for One Voyce, so we can imagine people singing it at home after hearing it in the theater.

 

I

Why should a foolish marriage vow,

Which long ago was made,

Oblige us to each other now,

When passion is decayed?

We loved, and we loved, as long as we could,

Till our love was loved out in us both;

But our marriage is dead, when the pleasure is fled:

’Twas pleasure first made it an oath.

 

II

If I have pleasures for a friend,

And further love in store,

What wrong has he, whose joys did end,

And who could give no more?

’Tis a madness that he should be jealous of me,

Or that I should bar him of another:

For all we can gain, is to give ourselves pain,

When neither can hinder the other.

 

     The Puritans had closed the theaters in 1642 and, in reaction, when drama returned in 1660 following Charles II’s taking the throne, the stage, only just free from several decades of prohibition, filled with libertines and loose women.  Reminiscent of the sophisticated hedonism of Cole Porter’s “Just One of Those Things” and familiar enough in an age when some espouse polyamory, this song must have offered audiences the thrill of transgression in the late seventeenth century. 

     Perhaps Dryden might object that this selection has leaned on his slightly improper poems.  If so, the intention  has simply been to challenge his reputation as dull and to make him accessible to readers unfamiliar with his work or with the period.  It is not, however, altogether inaccurate. Pepys, after all, hardly a prude himself, objected to Dryden’s play An Evening’s Love as “too smutty.”  Dryden was one of the last who could write of most any topic in verse with a poised and witty tone, constructing elaborate  rhetorical periods well-shaped and balanced, juggling abstractions often, it seems, simply for the fun of it.  At the same time in his own way he assumed the laureateship quite seriously, speaking for the nation in celebrations of royalty in poems like Britannia Rediviva and Threnodia Augustalis. 

     Like his contemporary Milton, Dryden does not enjoy the favor of modern taste.  This may be all the more reason that the reader may find in him something unexpected and once again new.  His craftsmanship and ingenuity remain exemplary in an age when the sound of poetry is largely neglected and rhetoric, long the heart of literary theory, has acquired a bad name.  Dryden’s mastery of the poetic line is evident throughout his work.  His poetry as well as his plays are at their best when read aloud. 

Pestilential Times

These are drafts of brief talks I was invited to prepare on literary responses to epidemics for an online library program. I venture to point out a few comparisons with our present situation and on this excuse have indexed this with politics. The quotations from Defoe are, scholars will notice, from an edition with modernized capitalization conventions.


I. Thucydides’ account of the plague in Athens

     There can be no good time for a pestilence, but the citizens of ancient Athens had reason to feel that the disease which spread in 430 BCE was peculiarly unlucky. The city was well into the Second Peloponnesian War with Sparta when, as Thucydides tells us, its citizens were suddenly struck by a greater plague than any had ever before experienced.
     Physicians of the day had no effective treatment. Thucydides notes that, as they were caring for the stricken, a great many doctors died. Magical recourse such as “supplications in the temples, divinations, and so forth” likewise proved of no value. Ultimately the disease (experts dispute the diagnosis) killed a hundred thousand people, a good third of the population of Athens. Thucydides, himself a survivor of the illness, describes the progress of physical symptoms in agonizing detail, but he regards the most horrifying effects to be psychological.


"But the greatest misery of all was the dejection of mind in such as found themselves beginning to be sick (for they grew presently desperate and gave themselves over without making any resistance), as also their dying thus like sheep, infected by mutual visitation, for the greatest mortality proceeded that way."


     He notes a detail that will not surprise Americans in 2020. The suffering of those on their deathbeds was increased by isolation. “For if men forebore to visit them for fear, then they died forlorn.”
     Even the healthy began behaving irresponsibly. As the number of victims grew, people began to neglect first proper burial rites and then “grew careless both of holy and profane things alike.” Those with money spent it profligately, thinking they might have but few days left. Licentiousness ruled ranging from rudeness to outright crime as social bonds dissolved. Many Athenians reacted to their own fear by descending into semi-savagery. They neglected the bonds of cooperation that joined them to their fellows. The social fabric that had produced Classical Greece was unraveling.
     Thucydides’ memorable depiction of this critical scene in Greek history is considerably heightened in drama and significance due to the fact that it is immediately preceded in his history by the celebrated account of Pericles’ funeral oration for the dead of the first year of the Second Peloponnesian War. Every nation commemorates its war dead as martyrs to the national values, and the society Pericles praises has much in it that we might yet admire. The ideals he celebrates are meaningful despite the facts that ancient Athens stood on the shoulders of slaves, that women were excluded from much of public life, that oligarchs and cliques regularly out-muscled majority rule, and that greed often motivated both foreign and domestic policy. The Athenians felt considerable pride in Hellenic superiority to “Asian” despotism.
     The single word in which Pericles sums up what is good about his city is liberty. He says, “our ancestors have handed down to us a free country.” He says the government “favors the many instead of the few; this is why it is called a democracy.” When he celebrates their practice of equality under the law and claims that people might there advance through individual merit in spite of low birth, he sounds very like an American.
     Pericles goes on to discuss what we might today call lifestyle issues, recommending a broadly liberal tolerance and consistent civility. “We do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbor for doing what he likes, or even to indulge in those injurious looks which cannot fail to be offensive, although they inflict no positive penalty.” In contrast to what he saw as the gloomy rigor of the Spartan garrisons, Athenians, he says, enjoy life. “Our rivals from their very cradles by a painful discipline seek after manliness, at Athens we live exactly as we please.” For a civilized person, Pericles thought, that embraces the pursuit of pleasure. “Further, we provide plenty of means for the mind to refresh itself from business. We celebrate games and sacrifices all the year round, and the elegance of our private establishments forms a daily source of pleasure and helps to banish the spleen.”
     He claims that such apparent casualness brings with it no weakness. “This ease in our private relations does not make us lawless as citizens.” “We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners” out of fear that they may be spying, trusting in “the native spirit of our citizens” to protect the city when necessary. In sum he says Athenians “are just as ready [as those under tyrannical regimes] to encounter every legitimate danger.”
     Pericles is clear that to him freedom, democracy, liberality, and tolerance make the land stronger than regimentation by encouraging every citizen to live as an individual while fully engaging in community life. The cohesiveness that comes from mutual respect and the joy that arises from the collective pursuit of the good life will, he feels, allow his people to defeat any despot’s challenge. Athens had, after, led the successful resistance to the Persians.
     The glorious ideal, however, was shredded by the plague. Patriotism had always concealed contradictions. Following the victory over Persia, Athens had been high-handedly manipulating the Delian League to allow itself ever greater benefits, establishing a sort of empire over other Greeks. This was, in fact, the cause of the war with Sparta. With the physical and psychological damage of the epidemic weighing against them, Athens lost, and a puppet regime, the Thirty Tyrants, was imposed over them. Socrates refused what he considered an unjust order from the Tyrants to arrest a certain Leon of Salamis. According to Plato’s Apology, he would have been killed for his defiance if the government had not fallen just in time. (It was a few years later, under so-called democracy, that he was, in fact, executed.) The Athenian system never recovered its strength, and not so very long after, Alexander subjugated not only Greece but much of the world to autocratic rule.
     No nation presently threatens the United States as Sparta did Athens, but we would do well to bear other parallels in mind. The fear of the Other in American racism and xenophobia, the appeal of a militarized economy, disrespect for the values of others, and the lure to some of an all-knowing tyrant who will relieve everyone else of the need to make decisions, all of these, I think, weaken America. They are likely to attract more people as fearfulness and anxiety increase in times of crisis.
     American society has long valued openness, freedom, tolerance, and liberality as ideals, however imperfectly they have been realized. The reader of Thucydides will surely conclude that, even under an epidemic, a society that loses these values may never recover them. America had been stressed by terrorism, economic inequality, and bad actors among other nation states, and the addition of a frightening illness only adds another potential catalyst for irrational decisions. The fact is that people who have a stake in their society, who believe in it, who have some control over their own lives, will be better citizens, both in peace and in war, than those who have been coerced into obedience.
     Ancient Athens offers a cautionary example. Frightened by the very real danger of illness and death, they gave up their commitment to each other and fell into fragmented isolation, chasing after individual ends. I have never seen such a danger of fascism as looms over the United States today. For the future of the American experiment to be bright, the right course can only be to redouble our cooperation and reinforce a sense of community that includes everyone. The yahoos holding demonstrations against pandemic precautions resemble the Athenians who panicked and abandoned what they believed in. Those who demonstrate against racism, the medical workers, the teenagers who are stocking grocery shelves, the people delivering our mail, these are the upholders of true American values. There is no easy way out, and people are daily dying, but the United States might still save its soul.



II. Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year


     Since the Black Death ravaged Europe in the fourteenth century, bubonic plague regularly took English victims, but in the days before antibiotics and antipyretics, many diseases might prove as fatal. The plague had broken out in London in 1592, 1603, 1625 and 1636. However, it returned in 1665 with a severity unseen for centuries. The best eyewitness account of this epidemic was written by Daniel Defoe in spite of the fact that he was only five years old when the disease killed a hundred thousand of his fellow citizens, nearly equaling within the city the staggering mortality rates that had occurred three hundred years earlier throughout Europe. Defoe’s book A Journal of the Plague Year, though it was published fifty years later, provides excellent and detailed reportage, full of both statistics and journalistic anecdotes, that allows the reader today to understand the experience of Londoners and to evaluate the public health measures with which the government sought to cope with the unfolding devastation.
     His book appeared in 1722, over fifty years after the events it describes, but at a time people were talking about the disease which had recently broken out anew in Marseille. Before publishing the Journal Defoe had tested the market with reportage about the disease in southern France and the release of his Due Preparations for Plague as well for Soul as for Body. His new book found plenty of readers. It sold well when first out, it has been consistently reprinted, and in March of 2020 Amazon reported that the popular Penguin edition had sold out. It is considered by many historians the best single account of the time, more useful than such contemporary publications as Hodge’s Loimologia or Vincent’s God’s Terrible Voice in the City or even Pepys’s diary.
     Apart from the topicality of the continuing danger of plague, as a professional author, Defoe doubtless saw a potential best-seller in the horrifying and sensational details he collected from a number of sources including the journal of an uncle with whose initials he signed the manuscript. The narrator cannot stay away from the giant corpse pit dug in the churchyard of St. Aldgate. We hear the voices of rumor and gossip. There were reports, Defoe tells us, of the dying sometimes leaping into the pit alive out of despair. A certain piper, he claims, was passed out drunk and mistakenly put on the dead-cart. As they proceeded toward the church, he stirred, causing one of the attendants to exclaim, “Lord, bless us! There’s somebody in the cart not quite dead!” eliciting the response, “I an’t dead though, am I?” which “made them laugh a little, though . . . they were heartily frighted at first.” Defoe records rumors of nurses who killed patients in their care, as well as “mothers murdering their own children in their lunacy, some dying of mere grief as a passion…others frightened into idiotism.” At times the cries of the afflicted seemed to fill the city and could be heard by anyone walking the streets. “ I wish I could repeat the very sound of those groans and of those exclamations that I heard from some poor dying creatures when in the height of their agonies…and that I could make them that read this hear, as I imagine I now hear them, for the sound seems still to ring in my ears.”
     When the plague struck, King Charles II and his notoriously pleasure-loving court along with many aristocrats promptly moved out of town, going first to Hampton Court in Salisbury, but then, when cases emerged there, on to Oxford. So many wealthy commoners (including the better class of physicians) left town in their wake that for days the streets were jammed with moving wagons. Among the affluent who remained, it was possible for Samuel Pepys, at least, to multiply his fortune fourfold and to write “I have never lived so merrily (besides that I never got so much) as I have done this plague time.” And Pepys was a man, we know, who fancied his wine and women.
     In contrast to the king and his circle, Lord Mayor John Lawrence, a middle-class businessman, announced that he, the aldermen, and the sheriffs would remain to combat the disease and ensure order. He issued plague regulations that included hiring doctors for the poor at public expense as well as “searchers,” older women in all neighborhoods, to report where deaths had occurred, and watchmen to oversee homes where victims, their families, and servants were sequestered. Some may find parallels between the utter neglect of duty by the crown and the responsible and aggressive action by lower authorities during the seventeenth century and today’s United States in which the would-be American king keeps minimizing the present pandemic, leaving it up to state officials with greater respect for science to take effective action to protect citizens.
     Just as today, simply purchasing food was a risky business. Though homes in which plague had been detected were locked down, depending on the watchman assigned to keep them in to run errands such as buying provisions, the symptomless continued to circulate about the streets. “And here I must observe again,” Defoe notes, “that this necessity of going out of our houses to buy provisions was in a great measure the ruin of the whole city; for the people catched the distemper, on these occasions, one of another.” He vividly recreates the experience of shoppers. “The butcher refused to hand the cook a cut of meat; she had to take it off the hook herself. And he wouldn’t touch her money; she had to drop her coins into a bucket of vinegar.”
     The mayor’s decisive action was not universally applauded. Defoe says, “The shutting up of houses was a subject of great discontent, and I may say indeed the only subject of discontent among the people at that time.” The poor suffered the most. Living in cramped quarters, with hardly the means of subsistence in normal times, it is little wonder that some refused to confine themselves. “What must I do?” he quotes one man as saying, “I can’t starve. I had as good have the plague as perish for want.” Today the news features armed protestors in Michigan invading the state capitol demanding an end to the state’s pandemic precautions. They have a good deal in common with those of whom Defoe said (with, admittedly, a certain classism), “But it was impossible to beat anything into the heads of the poor. They went on with the usual impetuosity of their tempers, full of outcries and lamentations when taken, but madly careless of themselves, foolhardy and obstinate, while they were well.” Defoe comments that the greater damage occurred when people thought the crest of the threat had passed and they prematurely moved to resume normal life.
     We might certainly echo Defoe’s observation that the illness stimulated extremes of both irresponsibility and duty. While the city government did its best to protect the people and some risked their own lives in tending to loved ones or total strangers, others behaved recklessly, going abroad into the city and out of it while carrying the disease. People evaded those appointed to guard them and keep them in their homes and were rumored even sometimes to have killed the watchmen.
     Then as now, quack nostrums proliferated. Our president has pushed remedies ranging from the semi-plausible (hydroxychloroquine) to the utterly preposterous (injections of bleach), and anxious patients have grasped after every straw. At a time when it seemed everyone was dying and medical science had little effective remedy for infections of any kind, such frauds are not surprising. Defoe has little patience with magic remedies. “But it was impossible to make any impression upon the middling people and the working labouring poor. Their fears were predominant over all their passions, and they threw away their money in a most distracted manner upon those whimsies.” Charms and amulets such as “Abracadabra, formed in triangle or pyramid” were sold to anxious buyers.
     Many interpreted the plague as a divine judgement and those who could attended services, some featuring Dissenting preachers in pulpits belonging to the Church of England from which the priests had fled. Street ministries flourished as well in what seemed to many apocalyptic times.


"In March, early in the plague, he was out on a warm morning, puffy clouds above in the blue sky, and saw a crowd surrounding a woman who was carrying on about a giant angel in the clouds pointing a sword at London. She gestured upward, calling on all to see. “Yes, I can see it all plainly,” said a member of the crowd. Another “saw (the angel’s) very face and cried out what a glorious creature he was.” The narrator was having none of this; he told the crowd only clouds bathed in sunshine were above. The crowd became agitated, the visionary woman angry. She blasted the narrator, screaming God’s judgment was approaching, “and despisers ... should wander and perish.” The narrator, sensing trouble in this world if not the next, moved on."


     In a passage that has proved finely ironic, Defoe attacks those who considered the disease a “stroke from Heaven,” against which it would be impious to struggle, reminding moderns of the leaders of Southern megachurches who refuse to halt their mass gatherings. Yet he goes on to comment on the “manifest ignorance” of those “who talk of infection being carried on by the air only, by carrying with it vast numbers of insects and invisible creatures.” And the persona of the Journal decides to remain in the city only after opening his Psalms randomly to a passage he takes as a sign from above.
     To him the epidemic represented an intensification of the general human dispensation rather than an example of special Providence. “A near view of death would soon reconcile men of good principles one to another, and that it is chiefly owing to our easy situation in life, and our putting these things far from us, that our breaches are fomented, ill blood continued, prejudices, breach of charity and of Christian union so much kept and so far carry'd on among us, as it is: another plague year would reconcile all these differences, a close conversing with death, or the diseases that threaten death, would scum off the gall from our tempers, remove the animosities among us, and bring us to see with differing eyes, than those which we look'd on things with before.”
     We might well wish for such an outcome ourselves, having progressed little toward enlightenment in the last three centuries. America can only hope that our own comparatively bearable privations and the deaths of so many fellow citizens, though proportionally so much less than those of the seventeenth century, might sweeten our temperaments and heighten our realization that cooperation is essential to our survival and, indeed, is what makes us human. Now, as we hear new mortality figures daily, some have taken this point to heart, but it seems that the twenty-first century pandemic has only caused others to cling more obstinately to selfishness and ignorance.