30 Defoe : his Life and Writings. [[JAN. 



unnoticed in its author's desk, with doubt, hesitation, and indifference. 

 Crciiilc postcri ! 



It was objected to " Robinson Crusoe/' on its publication, when to doubt 

 its other merits was impossible, that it had no claims to originality ; that, 

 in fact, it was a mere transcript of the " Adventures of Alexander 

 Selkirk.'* Of all objections to books of value, none are more common, 

 none more vulgar than this. True originality lies not in the mechanical 

 invention of incident and circumstance else who more original than 

 a high-flown startling melodramatist ? but in creating new matter for 

 thought and feeling ; in exploring the untried depths of the heart ; in 

 multiplying the sources of sympathy. Whoever excites a new emotion ; 

 whoever strikes a chord in the world's heart never struck before ; he is 

 the only inventor, the only sterling original. It is in this sense that we 

 style Shakspeare for all his plots, and the ground- work of the majority 

 of his characters, are borrowed a creator ; in this sense also we give 

 Wordsworth, and Scott, and Hazlitt, among the moderns, credit for the 

 same high attribute. To invent is to look into oneself, to draw from 

 one's own heart materials for the world's sympathy. This Defoe has 

 done throughout his " Robinson Crusoe." The " Adventures of Alex- 

 ander Selkirk" are the mere pegs on which he has hung his painting ; 

 the grouping on the canvass itself the light and shade of character and 

 description the development of incident the fine tone of feeling and 

 simplicity that pervades and mellows the entire composition these are 

 all essentially his own. 



Of Defoe's minor works, such, for instance, as his " Singleton," 

 " Moll Flanders," " Colonel Jack," &c., we shall say little, as we 

 have but an imperfect recollection of them, but we cannot prae- 

 termit his " History of the Plague in London," to which Professor 

 Wilson has been so largely indebted in his splendid, but somewhat 

 verbose dramatic poem of " The City of the Plague." Defoe's 

 narrative of this awful visitation is, from first to last, as impressive a 

 piece of writing as any in the annals of literature. It is superior 

 to the record, by Thucydides, of the same pestilence at Athens ; because, 

 though less a model of composition, less terse, less polished, less equable 

 in its classical spirit, it has incomparably more nature, more feeling, a 

 more rigid air of reality. Whoever has read this striking fiction (for 

 fiction it really is) will allow that it is one never to be forgotten. The 

 very opening, where Defoe tells us with an air of the most perfect 

 unconcern, as if unconscious of what is to follow, that " towards the 

 close of the summer of 1665, a report was spread throughout the parish 

 that three men had died of some strange disorder in Long- Acre," excites 

 curiosity, and rivets attention. But when he proceeds through the 

 different phases of his narrative when he glances at the grass growing 

 in the streets at the strange prodigies that harbingered the visitation 

 at the death of the first man who was indubitably proved to have fallen 

 a victim to the plague at the sound of the dead-cart at night, and the 

 houses marked by the fatal cross and, above all, when he sketches one 

 or two individual portraits, such as those of the mother and daughter 

 who were found dead in each others' arms, we feel the mastery of his 

 genius, and acknowledge, with mingled awe and wonder, that we are 

 indeed under the spell of the necromancer. 



We have little to add. " The History of the Plague," and the " Ad- 



