hardenedest

Updated: July 25, 2026

The very buriers of the dead, who were the hardenedest creatures in town, were sometimes beaten back and so terrified that they durst not go into houses where the whole families were swept away together, and where the circumstances were more particularly horrible, as some were; but this was, indeed, at the first heat of the distemper.

Daniel Defoe - A Journal of the Plague Year, written by a citizen who continued all the while in London