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*¢ For this e’er Phoebus rose he had implored 
Propitious Heaven, and every power adored, 
But chiefly Love—to Love an altar built 
Of twelve best French romances neatly gilt.” 
The great masters of English prose in Queen Anne’s reign, 
Addison, Steele, and Swift (I leave out philosophers like Locke, 
and statesmen like Bolingbroke), wrote nothing which resembled 
a novel more nearly than the “Sir Roger de Coverley Essays” in 
the Spectator, and the burlesque or satire of ‘“Gulliver’s Travels.” 
There is indeed one prose writer of that age who told a tale which 
seems destined to survive many once famous volumes, and to 
retain in its old age all the attractions of youth. Daniel de Foe’s 
“ Robinson Crusoe” has been translated, admired, and imitated in 
every language of the civilized world, and may fairly be said to be 
the parent of all books of adventure which have since been written 
in the English language. 
Here certainly was a man who discovered a rich unworked vein 
of literature, and who may claim, if any author may, to have been 
original. He possessed in an extraordinary degree the art of 
giving to his creations an air of reality and life; a great gift at all 
times, but one which perhaps gave even a higher degree of pleasure 
and illusion to the less jaded literary perceptions of his contempo- 
raries than it does to us. One advantage indeed he had which 
his modern imitators can never hope for: the world was younger 
then, and the belief in “Anthropophagi, and men whose heads do 
grow beneath their shoulders,” was not quite extinct. There was 
no Chinese Embassy established in Portland-place, nor did we 
import Zulu warriors and Japanese artisans to dance their war 
dances or ply their trades at the Aquarium for the amusement of 
Cockneys ; and if an inventive author stretched a point in his 
geography or his facts, there was no wire to bring back a correction 
next day from the uttermost parts of the earth; nor even a Literary 
Association whose members might put him right in the next 
week’s Carlisle Fournal, We was free, and his audience was 
trustful, and what they lost in accuracy, they gained perhaps in 
invention and wonder. 
