1881.] Defoe: his Life and Writings. 19 



under foot by the high churchmen on the one side, and the aristocratic 

 laity on the other. Public morality there was none, of public hypocrisy 

 an abundance ; religion was at a discount, patriotism below par. The 

 exterior forms, however, of worship were kept up with punctilious 

 severity, and of persecution there was quite enough on the part of 

 the high churchmen towards the dissenters to throw the Inquisition into 

 the shade. The bishops, of course, were the first to " beat the drum 

 ecclesiastic" of intolerance ; the magistrates followed ; the constabulary 

 kept them company, passibus cequis ; till at length the whole country ; 

 priest-ridden and law-ridden, as it ever has been was persuaded to 

 believe, that to be a dissenter was to be a rogue, a vagabond, and 

 an infidel. 



On the accession of James II. this intolerant spirit, so far from dimi- 

 nishing, increased, if possible, in acerbity. James himself, though 

 a bigot, was not ill-inclined towards the dissenters, whom he tacitly 

 encouraged, hoping thereby to weaken the power of the church, and 

 so bring forward his darling popery : but though the monarch was 

 thus favourably disposed towards the dissenters, the nation's prejudices 

 against them were artfully kept alive by the clergy, who. in those 

 troubled times, possessed an influence over their countrymen, which it 

 requires no great sagacity to foresee they can never possess again. 

 Defoe was no careless observer of this reign of terror, which he 

 exposed in a manner and with a spirit that soon brought down upon him, 

 that most rancorous of all hatred the odium theologicum. He enlisted 

 himself in the cause of the dissenters, fought their battles with intre- 

 pidity, exposed the persecutions of their enemies their folly their 

 madness their atrocity and was recompensed for such disinterested- 

 ness by the meagre consolation, that virtue is its own reward. 



But not polemics only, politics equally engaged his attention. At the 

 accession of James II., when, in return for his promise of support, the 

 bishops inculcated every where the doctrines of divine right- and passive 

 obedience, Defoe (then but twenty- four years of age) was among the 

 first to fathom the hypocrisy of both parties. With James in parti- 

 cular he was very early disgusted : he could not but perceive, that 

 nothing was to be expected from the liberality or toleration of a monarch 

 to whom a servile parliament, at. the very opening of his reign, was 

 willing to allow two millions and a half annually without check or hin- 

 drance, and whom the high churchmen supported in their pulpits as a 

 direct emanation from the Deity ; and accordingly was one of the 

 earliest to engage heart and soul in that ill-planned insurrection which 

 terminated in the destruction of the Duke of Monmouth and his fol- 

 lowers. 



It was not without difficulty that, after the disastrous battle of 

 Bridgewater, Defoe escaped from the west of England, and was 

 enabled to resume those commercial occupations by which he had 

 hitherto creditably supported himself. The nature of his business at this 

 period has been variously represented : his enemies were fond of giving 

 out that he was a paltry retail shop-keeper, but it appears that he wa s 

 a hose-factor, or middle man between the manufacturer and the retail 

 dealer. " This agency concern," says his biographer, " he carried on 

 for some years in Freeman's-court, Cornhill, from 1(385 to 1695. When 

 he had been in business about two years, he judged it expedient to link 

 himself more closely with his fellow citizens, and was admitted a livery- 



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