1831.] Defoe : his Life and Writings. 27 



" Long live Sacheverell !" a counter one was raised, of " Down with 

 Defoe I" Even assassination was attempted to be put in force against 

 him ; so difficult, so replete with hazard is the high task to make men 

 wiser or better than they are. Defoe was full a century in advance of 

 his age, and he paid the penalty of such maturity in the bitter, unsparing 

 abuse of his contemporaries. All parties combined to assail him. The 

 whigs detested him, the Jacobites avoided him, the high tories feared 

 him, and even the dissenters, in whose cause he had perilled his all, 

 for whom he had gone through the ordeal of fine pillory imprison- 

 ment even these for a season stood aloof from him. He was like 

 Cain, branded on his forehead with a mark, that all men might avoid 

 him. Time, however, did him justice: the malice of his enemies 

 slowly abated ; and as the quicksands of party were perpetually shifting, 

 Defoe gained more or less by such change. Still the persecutions he had 

 experienced made visible inroads on his health. In the autumn of life 

 he found himself without a green leaf on his boughs, his spirit blighted, 

 sapless, and ready at the first keen breeze that might blow rudely on 

 it, to fall a ruin to earth. Under these circumstances, in the year 1715, 

 shortly after the accession of George the First to the throne, he pub- 

 lished a pamphlet in defence of his whole political career, which he 

 entitled " An Appeal to Honour and Justice/' Scarcely was this 

 concluded, when its gifted author was struck with apoplexy, from 

 which his recovery was for a long time doubtful. 



On his restoration to health, Defoe embarked in a new career, and 

 amused himself with the composition of those works of fiction, some of 

 which will render his name immortal. In 1719 appeared " Robinson 

 Crusoe," founded on the true adventures of Alexander Selkirk, who 

 but a few years before had in no ordinary degree excited public atten- 

 tion ; in 1721, the " History of Moll Flanders ;" in 1722, the " Life of 

 Colonel Jack," and the " History of the Great Plague in London ;" 

 in 1723, " Memoirs of a Cavalier," and " Religious Courtship ;" in 1724, 

 " Roxana, or the Fortunate Mistress," and " A Tour through the whole 

 Island of Great Britain;" and in 1726, the " Political History of the 

 Devil," together with a vast variety of other miscellanies, both in prose 

 and verse, of which little now is known except to the hunters after 

 literary rarities. But age and infirmities were rapidly advancing 

 upon Defoe, and putting a stop to the further exercise of his invention. 

 Shortly after the marriage of one of his daughters, in 1729, he was 

 arrested for some trivial debt, and confined in prison till the year 1730, 

 which period was passed in sickness and acute mental anguish. As if 

 to fill up the measure of his suffering, his very children rebelled against 

 him, and on some mean pretext his son found means to deprive his aged 

 and heart-broken father of what little remained to him of the world's 

 wealth. This was too much for Defoe's fortitude. The principle of 

 life within him, already severely tried, now quite gave way : he 

 seldom spoke, was often seen in tears, or on his knees in prayer ; and 

 after some months of intense mental suffering, resigned himself without 

 a struggle to his fate, on the 24th of April, 1731, at the mature age of 

 seventy. 



Having thus sketched the main incidents in the political life of Defoe, 

 it remains to say a few words of him in that character by which he is 

 best known to posterity, namely, as an author. Of his fugitive tracts, 

 " thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks of Vallombrosa," on 



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