but of much greater value. That city, on the coast of Phœnicia, was illustrated by the study of the civil law, which opened the surest road to wealth and dignity; the schools of Berytus were filled with the rising spirits of the age; and many a youth was lost in the earthquake, who might have lived to be the scourge or the guardian of his country. In these disasters, the architect becomes the enemy of mankind. The hut of a savage or the tent of an Arab may be thrown down without injury to the inhabitant; and the Peruvians had reason to deride the folly of their Spanish conquerors, who with so much cost and labour erected their own sepulchres. The rich marbles of a patrician are dashed on his own head; a whole people is buried under the ruins of public and private edifices; and the conflagration is kindled and propagated by the innumerable fires which are necessary for the subsistence and manufactures of a great city. Instead of the mutual sympathy which might comfort and assist the distressed, they dreadfully experience the vices and passions which are released from the fear of punishment: the tottering houses are pillaged by intrepid avarice; revenge embraces the moment, and selects the victim; and the earth often swallows the assassin, or the ravisher, in the consummation of their crimes. Superstition involves the present danger with invisible terrors; and, if the image of death may sometimes be subservient to the virtue or repentance of individuals, an affrighted people is more forcibly moved to expect the end of the world or to deprecate with servile homage the wrath of an avenging Deity.
Plague — its origin and nature. A.D. 542 III. Æthiopia and Egypt have been stigmatized in every age as the original source and seminary or the plague.[1] In a damp, hot, stagnating air, this African fever is generated from the putrefaction of animal substances, and especially from the swarms of locusts, not less destructive to mankind in their death than in their lives. The fatal disease which depopulated the earth in the time of Justinian and his successors [2] first- ↑ I have read with pleasure Mead's short but elegant treatise, concerning Pestilential Disorders, the viiith edition, London, 1722.
- ↑ The great plague which raged in 542 and the following years (Pagi, Critica, tom. ii. p. 518), must be traced in Procopius (Persic. l. ii. c. 22, 23), Agathias (l. v. p. 153, 154 [c. 10]), Evagrius (l. iv. c. 29), Paul Diaconus (l. ii. c. 4, p. 776, 777), Gregory of Tours (tom. ii. l. iv. c. 5, p. 205) who styles it Lues Inguinaria, and the Chronicles of Victor Tunnunensis (p. 9 in Thesaur. Temporum), of Marcellinus (p. 54), and of Theophanes (p. 153 [leg. 188; A.M. 6034]). [The plague seems to have appeared in Egypt in A.D. 541, for we must obviously read "the 15th year of Justinian" instead of "the 5th" (ιἑ for έ) in Agathias, v. 10. Before the end of the year, the infection
