89 and 200, where Defoe mentions Eagles by name.

Josephus mentions: Flavius Josephus, Works (1773 edn.), IV.vii.12.

Apparitions in the Air: the flaming sword (see Genesis 3: 29) was a favourite in homiletic literature. Defoe refers to ‘a comet before the Destruction of Jerusalem, which hung for a year … directly over the City in the shape of a Flaming Sword’ (Applebee’s Journal, 2 Nov. 1723). Gadbury, De Cometis, 48, reports ‘a great black Coffin seen in the Air at Hamburgh, and other parts in Germany and Flanders’ before and during the second comet. He also says that one of the newsbooks reported ‘terrible Apparitions, and noises in the Air’. The respected Dr George Thomson, whose post-mortem examination of a plague victim was well known, asserted that apparitions were prophetic: ‘apparitions of Dracones volantes … Coffins carried through the Air … raining of blood … all of which having something extra naturam, are portentous and prodigious’ (Loimotamia, 55–6). In his Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (1727), 390, Defoe wrote: ‘It is without doubt, that Fancy and Imagination form a World of Apparitions in the Minds of Men and Women … when in short the Matter is no more than a Vapour in the Brain, a sick delirious fume of some in the Hypochondria.’

So Hypocondriac Fancy’s represent … resolve: these lines, slightly modified, are quoted from Defoe’s poem, A New Discovery of an Old lntreague (1691). Defoe used them twice in The Review, 29 Mar. 1705 and 24 May 1712, and again in his Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (1727), where he wrote: ‘These sham Apparitions which people put upon themselves are indeed very many; and our Hypochondriack People see more Devils at noon-day than Galilaeus did Starrs.… But this in no ways impeaches the main Proposition … that there are really and truly Apparitions of various kinds’ (p. 391).

Despisers … wander and perish: Acts 13: 41.

Conjunctions of Planets … malignant Manner: the malign conjunction of planets as a cause of plague; Saturn in conjunction with Mars or Jupiter was thought particularly malignant. This view was inherited by Defoe’s contemporaries from ancient and medieval times. At the time of the Black Death the Paris Faculty of Medicine gave it respectability, and in Defoe’s day it was not only astrologers who gave it credence. Medical thought which ascribed the plague to the corruption of the air held planets responsible in part. Kephale, Medela Pestilentiae, reflects this view of ‘unwholesome’ air: ‘When Mars in opposition is to Jove I The Air will be infected from above’ (p. 51). Gadbury, London’s Deliverance Predicted (1665), writes of the plague of 1625: ‘It was the consequence of a great Conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars, in the Celestial Sign Leo, a sign of the fiery triplicity, and representing the heart in the Microcosme, Ergo, the most dangerous’ (p. 7).

Conjunctions foretold Drought, Famine, and Pestilence: John Merrifield, Catastasis Mundi (London, 1684), wrote: ‘Histories, ancient Writers, and Common Experience in former Ages testifie to us, that these Signs in the Heavens, or appearances of Comets, are the assured forerunners of sterility of the Earth; Famine, Pestilence, War, Alteration of Empires … Winds, Earth-quakes, Inundations, extreme Heat and Drought, with grievous Diseases, and such like evils; also the Birth of some great Emperors, Kings, Governors, or Learned Men’ (p. 28).

Ministers … sunk … the Hearts … Hearers: cf. a typical sermon, such as Defoe may have heard at the time he was writing the Journal: ‘Multitudes falling dead in the streets and High-ways … Crowds of noisome Carcasses lie unburied, and rotting above Ground … populous Towns and Cities quite depopulated … on every side the Cries and Groans of the Dying and the Living … This famous Mart of Nations spews out her inhabitants, and the like Desolation over-runs our Country.’ This image of the plague was presented in a sermon preached before the House of Commons by Erasmus Saunders, 8 Dec. 1721, in A Discourse of the Dangers of Abusing the Divine Blessings, 30. A similar description was delivered at St Mary’s, Oxford, 16 Dec. 1720, by Thomas Newlin, a fellow of Magdalene College: ‘The Chambers of the Grave were not large enough to receive the number of its Guests, and the Land of Darkness could not contain the daily increasing Multitude. Those that died grievous Deaths had none to lament them, none to bury them. They are as Dung upon the face of the Earth, and their Carcasses are meat for the Fowls of Heaven, and for the Beasts of the Earth. The City is made an open Sepulchre’ (God’s Gracious Design in inflicting National Judgments (1721), 14).

ye will not come … Life: John 5: 40.

spoke nothing but dismal Things: in 1723 Defoe attacked the newswriters and others who, merely from ‘the Pleasure of Writing Dismal Stories, Exciting Surprize and Horror’, had exaggerated the horrors of the plague in southern France in 1720, thus terrifying people and injuring trade (Applebee’s Journal, 23 Nov. 1723).

terrifying the People: Defoe’s indictment of those who create fear in a time of plague reflects medical opinion in the period. The plague tracts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by physicians and laymen stated again and again that fear, despair, and dejection of spirits disposed the body to receive the contagion. This view was set forth by Van Helmont and Athanasius Kircher on the Continent, and was held firmly in England by doctors such as Mead, Rose, Pye, Thomson, and Blackmore. The laymen held to it as firmly. In 1665 Kemp describes a prescription which ‘is very excellent both against Fear, and a good preservative against the Plague’ (A Brief Treatise … of the Pestilence, 73).