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DEFOE: HTS LIFE AND WRITINGS.* 



FEW writers have ever lived who have encountered, though in a 

 somewhat limited sphere, more numerous vicissitudes, or been the 

 subject of more undeserved calumny than the author of " Robinson 

 Crusoe." He has touched the highest and the lowest point of honour 

 and disgrace. At one time a companion of the nobility a counsellor 

 of princes ; at another a man of the people, in bad odour at Court, but 

 whose acquaintance was deemed an honour by the commonalty ; at a 

 third, a proscribed adventurer a sort of Paine in society a 

 subject for the pillory a rebel and a mark for small wits to shoot 

 at ; the experience of Defoe, throughout an unusually protracted 

 life, has established the fact (were any additional proof needed), that 

 he who presumes to make men wiser or better than they are ; who puts 

 himself forth as a reformer, whether in religion, politics, or morals, 

 must make up his mind to bear in turn the abuse of all parties ; to be 

 the victim of ingratitude proportioned tp the benefits he has conferred 

 on society ; to be kicked spit upon and trampled under foot by the 

 lowest of the low, the basest of the base ; to be cursed by those whom 

 he has blessed in a word, to be anathematized and excommunicated 

 of men. The way to succeed in life is to wink at the vices of the age, 

 to be chary of its errors of thought and practice, to agree with it, to 

 flatter it, to walk side by side with it. The world, like a man with the 

 gout, cannot endure rough usage; hence those have always been in best 

 repute as moralists and men of sense, who have treated it with lenity 

 and forbearance. To walk with the world with an orthodox steady 

 pace, neither hastening before, nor lagging behind it, is in nine cases out 

 often to ensure its favour ; but to step forward, like a fugleman, from the 

 ranks of society, no matter how just be one's claims to such distinction, 

 is at once to rouse, first, the world's attention next, its envy and lastly, its 

 bitter, inextinguishable hatred. Defoe, unfortunately, was an aspirant 

 of this class. From earliest life he panted for distinction as a reformer, 

 and paid the penalty of such zeal by an indiscriminate abuse of the 

 age which he endeavoured to improve. But time, the great reformer 

 time who sinks the falsehood, and draws forth the truth, let it lie 

 deeper than ever plummet sounded has at last done him justice, and 

 Defoe, so long the mere scurrilous pamphleteer, the trashy novelist 

 the vulgar satirist the object of Pope's illiberal sneer " earless on 

 high stood unabashed Defoe" has now, by the just award of posterity, 

 taken his station in literature in the very front rank as a novelist, and 

 but a few degrees below Swift as a party- writer. 



It is of this prolific author that we here intend to say a few words, 

 taking for our guide Mr. Walter Wilson's late able and elaborate biogra- 



Daniel Foe or Defoe, as he chose to call himself was the son of a 

 butcher, and was born in the City of London, A.D. 1661, in the Parish 

 of St. Giles's Cripplegate. Both his parents were Non-conformists, and 

 early in life imbued Daniel with these strict religious principles which 

 gleam like a rainbow through the glooms and the clouds of his polemical 

 writings. When just emerging from childhood, he was placed under 



* Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Daniel Defoe. By Walter Wilson, Esq. of 

 the Inner Temple. 3 vols. Hurst, Chance, and Co. 1 830. 



M.M. New Series. VOL. XI. No. 61. D 



