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Defoe professes to write always with a moral, and even with a religious purpose. He was an honest and severe Presbyterian, who regarded actors as the "sons of hell," and was so thorough a Sabbatarian that he considered the licensing of a certain number of hackney-coaches to ply on Sundays as the worst blemish of King William's reign, and we suppose, therefore, a greater slur upon his memory than the massacre of Glencoe. He had from his youth belonged to a strait sect, and had shown himself willing to suffer persecution for his creed. When his minor fictions were published Defoe was more than sixty years of age, and had just produced one of the wholesomest and most beautiful tales we possess in the language. Is it possible that these far inferior books were written years before, when he was immured in art.

They are wonderfully like true histories; but considered as novels, which they are, there is not much in them. He had undoubtedly a knack of making fiction look like truth. But is such a knack much to be desired? Is it not of the same sort with the knack of a painter who takes in the birds with his fruit? I have seen dead game painted in such a way that I thought the partridges and pheasants real, but surely such pictures do not rank high as works of art? Villemain, and before him, Lord Chatham, were deceived by the Memoirs of a Cavalier,' but when those 'Memoirs' are known to be fictitious, what are they worth? How immeasurably inferior to 'Waverley' or the Legend of Montrose,' or 'Old Mortality'! As to Moll Flanders,' Roxana,' and 'Colonel Jack,' they are utterly wretched and nauseous; in no respect that I can see beyond the reach of Afra Behn."-Life of Lord Macaulay,' vol. ii. p. 454,

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Newgate, and when, doubtless, he acquired much of the special knowledge they exhibit, and that the extraordinary popularity of Robinson Crusoe,' which gained its high position at a bound, induced him to give them also to the world? It would be a satisfaction to think that such novels as 'Moll Flanders' and 'Roxana' were not among the last works of an old man. His aim, it may be admitted, was to portray the ugliness of vice and the divine beauty of virtue, and certainly he displays vice after a very undraped fashion. If people don't dislike it, he says, it is their own fault; and their fault too, if they do not gain instruction from the inevitable moral which follows the representation. But the first object of fiction is amusement; and this, in the novels we are speaking of, can be gathered only from the vicious or criminal adventures of the characters described. Books such as these are not taken up for the sake of instruction. It is impossible, therefore, to accept Defoe's asseverations that his sole object in writing his fictions was didactic, and we agree with the biographers of the novelist, that they cannot be recommended for indiscriminate perusal.

Of Defoe the man-apart from Defoe the politician, the polemic, the social reformer, and the novelistthere is so little to be said that the biographer who

attempts a portrait on a large scale is almost forced to write a history of his times and of his works. The times are interesting, the works manifold, and what with chronicle and criticism, abundant extracts and minute historical details, such a memoir easily swells out into goodly proportions. Still it may be questioned whether the little we know accurately of Defoe is not to some extent obscured by these extraneous details. From the midst of them, however, it is perhaps possible to form a portrait which, at least in its broader features, will be tolerably well defined.

How clear-sighted this man was, what abundant energy he possessed, how willingly he sacrificed private emolument for the public good, with what cheerfulness he turned the most adverse circumstances to practical account, how strong he was in the invincible ardour of an heroic soul-all this is duly set forth in Mr. Lee's 'Biography.' Forget the six fatal letters, and you will acknowledge that a braver specimen of English manhood never walked this island; remembering them sorrowfully, as you needs must, and while perplexed at the unrighteous conduct of a righteous man, you are content to confess you do not understand the inconsistency, and to accept, as compensation, the virtues of a life.

MATTHEW PRIOR.

AMONG the men of letters who have made the reign of the "good Queen Anne" (good perhaps, but dull certainly) so famous in our annals, it is remarkable that Pope alone can be said to have wholly dedicated his life to literature. For him there was no meaning in life apart from poetry, and the noble fame which poetry brought with it. His wretched physical condition and his proscribed creed were dead against him in the race for preferment and popularity. In his body he was one of the feeblest of men, so helpless that he had to be dressed by a servant, so much of a cripple that his enemies, with the gross lack of good feeling frequently displayed in that age, sneered at him as a hunchback. Pope possessed invincible courage, and knowing well his powers, and seeing that there was but one road open to him, resolved to rise in it above all competitors.

But

With his poetical contemporaries, on the other hand, literature, although in some cases heartily

appreciated, was used as a means rather than an end. It was the ladder by which they hoped to ascend to competence or fortune, not the goal towards which they directed their most wistful glances. In those days the first rungs of this ladder were frequently climbed by verse-making. Addison, who is probably the only writer that ever gained an official post by a simile, having compared Marlborough's "mighty soul" at Blenheim to an angel who

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pleased th' Almighty's orders to perform Rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm,"

advanced, a conqueror himself, from one position to another until he reached his highest elevation as Secretary of State; Tickell, who also gained place by his verses, was Under-Secretary, and afterwards Secretary to the Lords Justices of Ireland, a post, says Scott, of "high trust." Steele held three or four offices, and had no one but himself to blame for his pecuniary misfortunes. Congreve, thanks to the 'Old Bachelor,' received from Government an income of twelve hundred a year, and was supposed at least to perform certain duties in return. Atterbury was bishop of Rochester. Arbuthnot, perhaps the wittiest man of his time, who, according to his friend Swift, could do everything but walk, was one of the

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