Old Saint Paul\'s A Tale of the Plague and the Fire
THE GROCER OF WOOD-STREET AND HIS FAMILY. One night, at the latter end of April, 1665, the family of a citizen of London carrying on an extensive business as a grocer in Wood-street, Cheapside, were assembled, according to custom, at prayer. The grocer's name was Stephen Bloundel. His family consisted of his wife, three sons, and two daughters. He had, moreover, an apprentice; an elderly female serving as cook; her son, a young man about five-and-twenty, filling the place of porter to the shop and general assistant; and a kitchen-maid. The whole household attended; for the worthy grocer, being a strict observer of his religious duties, as well as a rigid disciplinarian in other respects, suffered no one to be absent, on any plea whatever, except indisposition, from morning and evening devotions; and these were always performed at stated times. In fact, the establishment was conducted with the regularity of clockwork, it being the aim of its master not to pass a single hour of the day unprofitably. The ordinary prayers gone through, Stephen Bloundel offered up along and fervent supplication to the Most High for protection against the devouring pestilence with which the city was then scourged. He acknowledged that this terrible visitation had been justly brought upon
If the French have as great an aversion for traveling as the English
have a propensity for it, both English and French have perhaps
sufficient reasons. Something better than England is everywhere to be
found; whereas it is excessively difficult to find the charms of
France outside France. Other countries can show admirable scenery, and
they frequently offer greater comfort than that of France, which makes
but slow progress in that particular. They sometimes display a
bewildering magnificence, grandeur, and luxury; they lack neither
grace nor noble manners; but the life of the brain, the talent for
conversation, the "Attic salt" so familiar at Paris, the prompt
apprehension of what one is thinking, but does not say, the spirit of
the unspoken, which is half the French language, is nowhere else to be
met with. Hence a Frenchman, whose raillery, as it is, finds so little
comprehension, would wither in a foreign land like an uprooted tree.
Emigration is counter to the instincts of the French nation. Many
Frenchmen, of the kind here in question, have owned to pleasure at
seeing the custom-house officers of their native land, which may seem
the most daring hyperbole of patriotism.
This preamble is intended to recall to such Frenchmen as have traveled
the extreme pleasure they have felt on occasionally finding their native
land, like an oasis, in the drawing-room of some diplomate: a pleasure
hard to be understood by those who have never left the asphalt of the
Boulevard des Italiens, and to whom the Quais of the left bank of the
THE GROCER OF WOOD-STREET AND HIS FAMILY. One night, at the latter end of April, 1665, the family of a citizen of London carrying on an extensive business as a grocer in Wood-street, Cheapside, were assembled, according to custom, at prayer. The grocer's name was Stephen Bloundel. His family consisted of his wife, three sons, and two daughters. He had, moreover, an apprentice; an elderly female serving as cook; her son, a young man about five-and-twenty, filling the place of porter to the shop and general assistant; and a kitchen-maid. The whole household attended; for the worthy grocer, being a strict observer of his religious duties, as well as a rigid disciplinarian in other respects, suffered no one to be absent, on any plea whatever, except indisposition, from morning and evening devotions; and these were always performed at stated times. In fact, the establishment was conducted with the regularity of clockwork, it being the aim of its master not to pass a single hour of the day unprofitably. The ordinary prayers gone through, Stephen Bloundel offered up along and fervent supplication to the Most High for protection against the devouring pestilence with which the city was then scourged. He acknowledged that this terrible visitation had been justly brought upon