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Not more than half the pallets were occupied; but as the sick were in a great measure left to themselves, the utmost disorder prevailed. A troop of lazars, with sheets folded around them, glided, like phantoms, along Paul's Walk, and mimicked in a ghastly manner the air and deportment of the gallants who had formerly thronged the place.
They contented themselves, therefore, with watching his course, and were not a little surprised and alarmed to find the whole troop of lazars set off after him, making the sacred walls ring with their cries.
Here, however, all the lazars and the wretched in Rome were collected together; hundreds of young and old in that extreme of squalor, nakedness, and disease which affrights the English traveller in Italy, were seen on all sides; and their importunities and cries, for the love of God, and the mercy of Christ, to relieve them, thrilled in his ears, and smote upon his heart to such a degree, that his joints became as it were loosened, and his legs scarcely able to support him.
It was a senseless and fragmentary and topsy-turvy harangue; but here and there came out facts which were true. It is no small thing to speak even as he did, seeing it is not his trade. I should like to see you do it. Yes, you! What he said about the lepers at Burton Lazars is an undeniable fact. Besides, he is not the first man who has talked nonsense.
The master of the ceremonies hath for his pact fiue duckats, sometimes tenne, sometimes twentie, the rest haue tenne Iulies a piece, or els a certaine number of other presents called Caxæ. The meate that was ordained, as soone as the dead corps friends and all the Bonzii are gone, is left for such as serued at the obsequie, for the poore and impotent lazars.
Around the little conduit standing in front of the Old Change, at the western extremity of Cheapside, were three lazars laving their sores in the water; while, in the short space between this spot and Wood-street, Leonard counted upwards of twenty doors marked with the fatal red cross, and bearing upon them the sad inscription, "Lord have mercy upon us!"
By and by, when darkness was coming down like a playhouse curtain, and the Northern wagoner up yonder how often have I watched him at sea! was yoking his seven cart-mares to the steadfast star, I came upon a Man the first I had seen since the Old Gentleman bade me begone with my Guinea, and join the Blacks. This Man was not walking or running, nay nor sitting nor lying as Lazars do in hedges.
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