Note 1 — Chapter VIII · Leyden’s Painters, a Fanatic and a Hero

“In many a house the watchmen, in their rounds, found a whole family of corpses, father, mother and children, side by side; for a disorder called the plague, naturally engendered of hardship and famine, now came, as if in kindness, to abridge the agony of the people. The pestilence stalked at noonday through the city, and the doomed inhabitants fell like grass beneath it scythe. From six thousand to eight thousand human beings sank before this scourge alone, yet the people resolutely held out—women and men mutually encouraging each other to resist the Page 126entrance of their foreign foe—an evil more horrible than pest or famine.1