precision of their arguments, were admirably adapted for such work. In point of elegance Swift carries off the palm; but Defoe's frequent colloquialisms and rough and ready modes of expression were very well suited for the audience which he addressed. The fame of political writings, however, is generally shortlived, and it is not what he did in this way that gives him a title to be mentioned here. It was not till he was past the prime of life that Defoe began the series of works to which he owes his fame. "Robinson Crusoe" appeared in 1719, "Captain Singleton" in 1720, "Colonel Jack" in 1721, and the "Journal of the Plague" in 1722. These are only a few of the many long works which issued from his prolific pen; he wrote besides on religion, on success in business, on his own adventures, and several works of fiction, the latter for the most part dealing with characters from the lowest strata of society. In all his books we find the same characteristics: a style often incorrect and never rising into dignity or eloquence, but always clear, flowing, and graphic; a matter-offact imagination, which gives his productions a wonderful air of veracity; and a knowledge of different types of society, especially among the lower classes, such as has perhaps never been attained by any writer. His "Journal of the Plague" is so minute, so circumstantial, so exactly like reality, that it was believed by Dr. Mead to be the work of a medical man ; and his "Memoirs of a Cavalier" (the precise date of the publication of which is unknown) was taken by Lord Chatham and many others for a real history. Of Defoe's minor novels we need not say much. The subjects with which they deal, and the elaborate minuteness with which scenes of vice are described in them, do not tend to edification. It is difficult to believe that Defoe was not led to the choice of his peculiar themes by a secret sympathy with roguery. He certainly had an extraordinary fondness for exploring in their minutest recesses the shady corners of life. In his novels, it has been said with much truth, "we rarely meet with anything more exalted or respectable than masters of trading vessels, dealers in small wares, supercargoes, or it may be pickpockets, pirates,

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candidates for the plantations, or emeriti who have already obtained that distinction. In the foreground we have the cabin, the night-cellar, the haunts of fraud, or the roundhouse; in the distance, Newgate or Execution Dock."

Infinitely healthier in tone, and superior also in literary skill, is Defoe's masterpiece, "Robinson Crusoe." Perhaps the universal fame of this work as a book for the young makes it more neglected than it should be by readers in general. The subject was one admirably adapted for Defoe's genius. The patient ingenuity with which he piles detail on detail, his thorough identification of himself with his hero, even the wearisome and commonplace religious meditations interspersed through the book, combine to give it such an appearance of reality that in reading it the insight and genius necessary to produce such a result fall out of view, and we imagine ourselves attending to the wonderful adventures of a veritable English sailor, rather prone to loquacity and moralising, but fertile in resources, and possessing more than an average proportion of the ordinary English faculty of adapting oneself with as good grace as possible to any situation. Robinson Crusoe is no hero of romance, destitute of the fears and weaknesses belonging to men in general, but simply a stouthearted mariner, determined not to be vanquished by obstacles which there is any possibility of overcoming. "Is there any modern novelist, who, wishing to represent a very brave, adventurous young man, would have sufficient confidence in himself to make him beat his breast and sob and cry like a madman, trusting to his resources to prove that such conduct was a part of the bravest, hardiest, and most indomitable character that genius ever conceived? Defoe knew that courage is not a positive quality which some men have and others want; that it is that willingness to do disagreeable things which we have all acquired in some measure, but that there are acts of courage which the very bravest are only just able to do, and in which even they falter and tremble. How nobly is this brought out in Crusoe's behaviour on the island! At first he is in a passion of grief almost amounting

to madness; 'but I thought that would do little good, so I began to make a raft,' &c. Little by little he calms down, often fairly giving way to the horrors of his situation, but always, after a time, setting to work manfully on whatever comes next to hand, until at last his mind grows into a state of settled content and cheerfulness, to which none but a man ribbed with tripled steel could have attained. There is a fearless humility about the whole conception of Crusoe of which we have almost lost the tradition." One of the great attractions of "Robinson Crusoe" is the boundless scope which it gives to the imagination of the reader in conjecturing what he would have done had he occupied Crusoe's position. This helps to give an interest to the smallest details, making us follow such passages as those in which he gives an account of his difficulties in getting a boat out to sea, the methods which he took to raise and preserve his crops, &c., with something of a personal interest. The fine and sublime conception of a shipwrecked mariner cast on a desert island is one which, to a writer with a genius less happily constituted for his subject than Defoe's, would have offered almost irresistible temptations to indulge in high-flown and philosophical meditations above the reach of the hero, and above the reach of humanity in general, thus, in great measure, taking away from the reader the power of, as it were, substituting himself for Crusoe, besides greatly diminishing the fascination of the story. The superiority of the first part of “Robinson Crusoe" is no doubt to be largely attributed to the excellence of the subject: the second part, where the solitude is broken in upon by a crowd of planters and ship-captains, is little if at all superior to Defoe's other novels.

A man of very different character from Defoe was our next great novelist, Samuel Richardson, the equable current of whose career is in striking contrast to Defoe's active and bustling life. In intellect, also, and in choice of subjects, the two men differ greatly, but there is some resemblance between their 1 Fitzjames Stephen on "The Relation of Novels to Life,” in “Cambridge Essays" for 1855, p. 188.

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styles. Both loved great minuteness of detail, both were apt to deal too much in what may be called the "inventory" style of writing, omitting no fact or incident, even the least important, and both in consequence sometimes become intolerably long-winded, though there is a certain dramatic. propriety about Defoe's tediousness which is wanting in Richardson's. An industrious, frugal, punctual man, attending carefully to business, and avoiding every kind of dissipation, Richardson passed a happy and blameless life, surrounded by a host of female admirers who were never tired of praising him. He drank in all their flattery with greedy ears; for he was a vain man, and, like most vain men, preferred the society of women to that of men. The story of his life presents no unusual or striking incidents, and need not detain us long. He was born in 1689, apprenticed to a printer in 1706, served his apprenticeship, worked for some years as a compositor, and then set up in business on his own account in Fleet Street. To the end of his life he continued to keep his shop, and was thus able to avoid the many hardships and privations which in his day were the common lot of men of letters. Perhaps in all London it would not have been possible to find a man who to the casual observer bore a more thoroughly commonplace appearance.

Yet in this man there was a spark of the divine fire of genius, and although he was well advanced in life before he thought of appearing as an author, it so happened that he had unintentionally from a very early period been training himself for the work which he was to accomplish. "As a bashful and not forward boy," he writes, "I was an early favourite with all the young women of taste and reading in the neighbourhood. Half-a-dozen of them, when met to work with their needles, used, when they got a book they liked, and thought I should, to borrow me to read to them, their mothers sometimes with them, and both mothers and daughters used to be pleased with the observations they put me upon making.

"I was not more than thirteen when three of these young women, unknown to each other, having a high opinion of my

taciturnity, revealed to me their love secrets, in order to induce me to give them copies to write after, or correct, for answers to their lovers' letters; nor did any of them ever know that I was the secretary to the other. I have been directed to chidie, and even repulse, at the very time that the heart of the chider or repulser was open before me, overflowing with esteem and affection, and the fair repulser, dreading to be taken at her word, directing this word or that expression to be softened or changed. One, highly gratified with her lover's fervour and vows of everlasting love, has said, when I have asked her direction, 'I cannot tell you what to write; but' (her heart on her lips) 'you cannot write too kindly;' all her fear was only that she should incur slight for her kindness."

Thus it was that Richardson began to acquire that knowledge of the depths and windings of the human heart which constitute his strength as a novelist. The occupation above described does not appear to be a very suitable one for a boy of thirteen, and it must be confessed that Richardson had in his character a good deal of the prig and not a little of the milksop. Yet it is to his engaging in this curious employment that we owe "Pamela" and "Clarissa." Having found out that he had a talent for letter-writing, Richardson continued to practise the art as much as his opportunities allowed, and thus acquired considerable facility in composition. About 1739 two booksellers asked him to write for them "a little book of familiar letters on the useful concerns of common life." He consented; the design gradually expanded under his hands; and "Pamela" was the result. The first two volumes appeared in 1741, and were received with a chorus of public approbation comparable to that which welcomed "Waverley" or the "Pickwick Papers." Dr. Sherlock recommended the work from the pulpit. Pope declared that it would do more good than twenty volumes of sermons. enthusiastic gentleman went so far as to say that if all other books were to be burned, the Bible and "Pamela" should be preserved. Nor was the enthusiasm about the book confined to England. It was translated into French, and excited as

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