His wife had, during two or three days, been poorly; and on the preceding evening grave symptoms had appeared.

Sir Thomas Millington, who was physician in ordinary to the King, thought that she had the measles.

But Radcliffe, who, with coarse manners and little book learning, had raised himself to the first practice in London chiefly by his rare skill in diagnostics, uttered the more alarming words, small pox.

That disease, over which science has since achieved a succession of glorious and beneficient victories, was then the most terrible of all the ministers of death.

The havoc of the plague had been far more rapid; but the plague had visited our shores only once or twice within living memory; and the small pox was always present, filling the churchyards with corpses, tormenting with constant fears all whom it had not yet stricken, leaving on those whose lives it spared the hideous traces of its power, turning the babe into a changeling at which the mother shuddered, and making the eyes and cheeks of the betrothed maiden objects of horror to the lover.