Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Old Saint Paul's: A Tale of the Plague and the Fire
It is characteristic of Defoe that he rejects, with all the sober gravity of the historian the tale that the blind piper started his music in the cart, and so frightened the bearers away. He even denies that the piper was blind - he was only an ignorant, weak, poor man, playing his pipes from door to door and finding custom especially at the public-houses where they knew him and would give him drink and victuals, and sometimes farthings. Defoe's is the method of the Dutch painters, an absolute fidelity to every detail, no matter how commonplace or grotesque it may be. Ainsworth as a disciple of the romantic school has no such scruples his piper is blind, and is provided with a faithful dog, and a beautiful damsel whose father he is supposed to be, but who is in reality the daughter of a nobleman.
The pestilence of 1665, as it was the last so it was the greatest of the plagues by which London had been afflicted, not even excepting the Black Death of 1349.
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