the central portion of Defoe's life has little relation to literature, and is so excessively obscure that there was no thread to guide the investigator through it, until Mr. William Lee published the result of his exhaustive researches in 1869. It is now known that Defoe did not withdraw from journalism in 1715, as was long supposed, but continued to edit and contribute to newspapers until 1726. In many ways Defoe may justly be

As

considered as the founder of
modern journalism, in its good
as well as in its bad features.
In the course of catering for
his newspapers, Defoe inter
viewed with impartiality a sur-
prising variety of persons, and
became familiar with their
modes of life and language;
he thus prepared himself for
his later and far more import-
ant work as an author.
early as 1706, in The Appari-
tion of Mrs. Veal, he wove
reality into a kind of natural-
istic fiction. But his boldest
and more original work in this
line was not begun until he
was approaching his sixtieth
year. In 1719 Defoe pub-
lished his celebrated romance
of Robinson Crusoe, the first
of its class in English literature.
This was founded on a report
of the adventures of a certain
Alexander Selkirk (or Selcraig),
who had been marooned on
Juan Fernandez. The instant
success of this wonderful book
revealed to Defoe the fact
that he had struck, as by

Clark & Pinese

accident, on a rich lode of gold. Perhaps he had already composed other stories of this kind, for the almost simultaneous appearance of three such long novels as Mr. Duncan Campbell, Captain Singleton, and (perhaps) Memoirs of a Cavalier, all printed in 1720, is hardly to be accounted for except on the theory that the MSS. of them were already partly in existence when Robinson Crusoe became famous. These novels of Defoe's old age continued to appear with startling rapidity; before the end of 1722, Moll Flanders, The Plague Year, and Colonel Jack were added to the list. Roxana, the latest of his important romances, belongs to 1724. An innate vulgarity curiously characteristic, for all its genius, of the mind of Defoe, appears unabashed in his doubtless ironical Complete English Tradesman of 1725-7,

which had a very considerable influence on its multitude of readers, but the bent of which, as Charles Lamb has justly said, is "to narrow and to degrade the heart." The composition of all these books was very lucrative, and Defoe retired to Newington, then a rural village, and built himself there a handsome house. Here he culti

Illustration by Thomas Stothard to "Robinson Crusoe"

vated a large garden, wrote and studied, and enjoyed the society of "three lovely daughters." He had two sons, who were not quite satisfactory. The second of these sons seems to have borne some part in the painful exposure of Defoe, which occurred in 1726, when his connection with the Government, which had been kept absolutely dark from even his closest associates, became known. Defoe was much attacked, and probably suffered even in his pocket; "the old man cannot trouble you long," he meekly responded. In 1729, it is impossible to tell why, he had to disappear from his house in Newington, and hid himself in the neighbourhood of Greenwich, holding mysterious intercourse with his family. He complained of "a perjured, contemptible enemy," and he transferred his Newington estate to another name. He was, in all probability, still hiding from real or imaginary foes when

death found him, on the 26th of April 1731, in a lodging in Ropemakers' Alley, Moorfields. It has been suggested, as a conjectural explanation of all this mystery, that he had become the victim of senile and insane delusions.

FROM "ROBINSON CRUSOE."

During the long time that Friday has now been with me, and that he began to speak to me, and understand me, I was not wanting to lay a foundation of religious knowledge in his mind; particularly I asked him one time who made him? The poor creature did not understand me at all, but thought I had asked who was his father; but I took it by another handle, and asked him who made the sea, the ground we walked on, and the hills, and woods; he told me it was one Old

Benamuckee, that lived beyond all. He could describe nothing of this great person, but that he was very old; much older, he said, than the sea, or the land; than the moon, or the stars: I asked him then, if this old person had made all things, why did not all things worship him; he looked very grave, and with a perfect look of innocence, said, "All things do say O to him." I asked him if the people who die in his country went away

anywhere; he said yes, they all went to Benamuckee; then I asked him whether these they eat up went thither too, he said yes.

From these things, I began to instruct him in the knowledge of the true God: I told him that the great Maker of all things lived up there, pointing up towards heaven; that He governs the world by the same power and providence by which He had made it; that He was omnipotent, could do everything for us, give everything to us, take everything from us; and thus by degrees I opened his eyes. He listened with great attention, and received with pleasure the notion of Jesus Christ being sent to redeem us, and of the manner of making our prayers to God, and His being able to hear us, even into heaven; he told me one day, that if our God could hear us up beyond the sun, He must needs be a greater God than their Benamuckee, who lived but a little way off, and yet could not hear till they went up to the great

mountains where he dwelt, to speak to him. I asked him if ever he went thither to speak to him; he said no, they never went that were young men; none went thither but the old men, whom he called their Oowocakee, that is, as I made him explain it to me, their religious or clergy, and that they went to say O (so he called saying prayers), and then came back, and told them what Benamuckee said; by this I observed, that there is priestcraft, even amongst the most blinded ignorant

VOL. III.

R

Henry St. John

(1678-1751)

Pagans in the world; and the policy of making a secret religion, in order to preserve the veneration of the people to the clergy, is not only to be found in the Roman, but perhaps among all religions in the world, even among the most brutish and barbarous savages.

With Defoe and Mandeville we have strayed outside the inner circle of Queen Anne wits. We return to its centre in speaking of Bolingbroke and Berkeley. With the progress of criticism, however, the relative value of these two typical eighteenth-century names is being slowly but decisively reversed. The fame of BOLINGBROKE, once so universal, has dwindled to a mere shadow. He lives as an individual, not any longer as a writer. His diffuse and pompous contributions to theistical philosophy are now of interest mainly as exemplifying several of the faults of decaying classicism-its empty rhetoric, its vapid diction, its slipshod, inconsistent reasoning. In fact, if Bolingbroke demands mention here, it is mainly as a dreadful example, as the earliest author in which the school which culminated in Pope, Addison, and Swift is seen to have passed its meridian and to be declining. The cardinal defect of classicism was to be its tendency to hollowness, to intellectual insincerity and partisanship, and this defect is so clearly exposed in Bolingbroke that we read him no longer.

Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751), was the son of Sir Henry St. John and of his wife, a daughter of the Earl of Warwick, and was born in London in October 1678. He was educated at Eton and at Christ Church, Oxford; he married at the age of twenty-two, entered Parliament, and was Secretary for War at twenty-six. He was raised to the peerage in 1712, and in 1714 threw in his lot with the Pretender. It was not until 1723 that he made peace with the English court and resumed political life. Most of his later life was spent in France. Bolingbroke died in London on the 12th of