effects of adversity, or how they might equally be called to sustain his hero's trials, as they sailed round the world? But, without attractions, neither the originality nor the end can have any salutary consequence. This he had foreseen; and for this he has provided by giving his adventures in a style so pleasing, because it is simple, and so interesting, because it is particular, that every one fancies he could write a similar language. It was, then, idle in Boyer formerly, or in Smollett lately, to speak of De Foe as a party writer in little estimation. The writings of no author since have run through more numerous editions, and he whose works have pleased generally and pleased long, must be deemed a writer of no small estimation; the people's verdict being the proper test of what they are the proper judges.

"As a polemic, I fear we must regard our author with less kindness, though it must be recollected that he lived during a contentious period, when two parties distracted the nation, and writers indulged in great asperities. But, in opposition to reproach, let it be ever remembered, that he defended freedom without anarchy; that he supported toleration without libertinism; that he pleaded for moderation even amidst violence. With acuteness of intellect, with keenness of wit, with archness of diction, and pertinacity of design, it must be allowed that nature had qualified, in a high degree, De Foe for a disputant. His polemical treatises, whatever might have been their attractions once, may now be delivered without reserve to those who delight in polemical reading. De Foe, it must be allowed, was a party writer; but were not Swift and Prior, Steele and Addison, Halifax and Bolingbroke, party writers? De Foe being a party writer upon settled principles, did not change with the change of parties; Addison and Steele, Prior and Swift, connected as they were with persons, changed their note as persons were elevated or depressed.

"As a commercial writer, De Foe is fairly entitled to stand in the foremost rank among his contemporaries, whatever may be their performances or their fame. Little would be his praise to say of him, that he wrote on commercial legislation like Addison, who, when he touches on trade, sinks into imbecility, without knowledge of fact, or power of argument. The distinguishing characteristics of De Foe as a commercial disquisitor are originality and depth. He has many sentiments with regard to traffic, which are scattered through his Reviews, and which I never read in any other book. His 'Giving Alms no Charity' is a capital performance, with the exception of one or two thoughts about the abridgment of labour by machinery, which are either half formed or half expressed. Were we to compare De Foe with D'Avenant, it would be found that D'Avenant has more detail from official documents; that De Foe has more fact from wider inquiry. D'Avenant is more apt to consider laws in their particular application; De Foe more frequently investigates commercial legislation in its general effects. From the publications of D'Avenant it is sufficiently clear, that he was not very regardful of means, or very attentive to consequences; De Foe is more correct in his motives, and more salutary in his ends. But, as a commercial prophet, De Foe must yield the palm to Child, who, foreseeing from experience that men's conduct must finally be directed by their principles, foretold the colonial revolt. De Foe, allowing his prejudices to obscure his sagacity, reprobated that suggestion, because he deemed interest a more strenuous prompter than enthusiasm. Were we, however, to form an opinion, not from special passages, but from whole performances, we must incline to De Foe, when compared with the ablest contemporary: we must allow him the preference, on recollection, that when he writes on commerce he seldom fails to insinuate some axiom of morals, or to inculcate some precept of religion.

• "See the Present State of the War, and the Necessity of an Augmentation;' and see his Commercial Papers in the Freeholder.'

eye, nothing is visible but the easy unconstraint of nature, and the fearlessness of truth. Besides, it must be allowed that the temptation to imitate was as small as the difficulties were many and great; for whilst he transcribed from the volume of life with a fidelity and closeness that have never been equalled, with a singularly mortified taste, he chose the plainest and least inviting pages of the whole book. Those who would imitate De Foe must copy from nature herself; and, instead of dressing her out to advantage, content themselves with delineating some of her simplest and homeliest features.

"In the distribution of talents among men of genius, two or three are generally found united in the same mind, whilst not one of them is possessed in perfection. But Nature, when she made De Foe, seems to have forsaken her usual practice, and, in a playful mood, to have sent him into the world with one mighty talent for his portion, but destitute of almost every other. Amidst an entire ignorance of the more elevated passions and feelings of mankind, a surprising poverty of imagination, and a total dearth of humour and wit, of fancy and eloquence, our admiration, or rather our wonder, is still taxed to the utmost by a display of invention the most unbounded, and a faculty of imitation the most consummate. His fictions are not so much the counterfeit of something existing, as they are themselves the very originals; the creations of his brain do not wear the semblance only of truth, but are absolutely quickened with its vitality; his phantoms, if such we may call them, steal not forth at eventide, apparent only when the actual world is obscured; they walk abroad in the open day, and are not to be distinguished from the substantial forms and realities of life. No unlucky mischance or awkward gesture betrays the hand that directs their motions; the real author never for an instant obtrudes himself into the presence of his reader, the imaginary hero is the only person who appears upon the stage, and of his existence we are as well convinced as we are of our own. With a confiding security in the genuineness of his memoirs, we follow him over land and sea, engage with him in adventures, sometimes marvellous, 'always strange-accompany him in travels where human foot had never penetratedsail with him in latitudes where ship had never been, along coasts that were never laid down in a chart; and all the time have not the least suspicion that our companion is a mere shade, and that the author who has thus led us in imagination round the world never stirred from the desk at which he wrote. Our fellow traveller is sometimes a soldier, but more frequently a sailor, who is merchant or pirate as opportunity dictates, and always a rogue; but this is respectable society. We are sometimes introduced into company of which an honest man may well be ashamed, and then we take a trip to the plantations, or skulk in holes and corners to avoid the pursuit of justice. But whether soldier or sailor, merchant or pirate, thief, or what not, we, at least, never suspect him of being an impostor, but give him ample credit for having perpetrated all the rogueries which he so deliberately recounts. All that he does, or says, or thinks, is in the line of his vocation, whatever that may happen to be. His language is always that of the plain and unlettered person he professes himself; homely in phraseology,—in expression rude and inartificial; yet like that of one who has received a distinct impression of objects which he has seen, it is often forcible, happy, and strongly descriptive. Generally speaking, in other fictitious narratives, a tendency to moralize out of reason, or in a vein too elevated for the character assumed, or a continued effort to be uniformly wise or elaborately witty, is almost sure to unmask the impostor, and expose the dreaming pedant at his desk; or if these characteristic marks be wanting, either the narrative is inconsistent with itself, or it contradicts some known and established fact, or there is some anachronism, or some other overt act against truth is committed, which critical sagacity seldom fails to detect and punish. But our author is never caught tripping in this way; he moralizes, to be sure, as much or more than most writers, but then his

reflections are always in the right vein: he never steps from behind the curtain to figure away himself upon the stage. Either a vigilance that was perpetually on the watch preserved him from error, or he went right by mere instinct; or he so identified himself with his imaginary hero that he became, in fancy, the very individual he was creating, and was therefore necessarily always in character. But, whatever vigilance he used, he has always the art to appear perfectly unconcerned; there is none of the constraint that usually accompanies a painful effort to support imposture; his hero is not stiff and awkward like a puppet, which has no voluntary motion, but moves freely and carelessly along the stage; talks to us in an honest, open, confidential sort of way; lays his inmost thoughts and feelings open before us, as before a confessor, without caution or subterfuge; and by never asking our belief, never seeming conscious of a possibility of its being denied, fairly compels us to grant it.

"A circumstance peculiar to the fictions of De Foe, and which greatly tends to give them an air of reality, is, that their subjects are not such as are usually adopted by the writers of romance. They think it beneath them to have aught to do with anything but great names and high rank; or if ever they make a stoop from their greatness, it is to descend at once into the very lowest class of men, whose rudeness has something in it of the picturesque. Between the palace and the hovel there is seldom an intermediate stage for the genius of romance to put up at, and consequently we never expect to meet with the pains-taking people who inhabit houses of brick, dealers in small wares, shopkeepers, and masters of trading vessels, straying through the realms of fiction. Now this is precisely the sort of company into which De Foe introduces us, and their adventures have more the air of matters of fact, in consequence of their names and professions sounding so unromantic and common-place. There is another peculiarity in his fictions, which is still more remarkable. Our author's indifference to the fair sex is well known, as also that he has fallen under their ban for having presumed to show that any story could be made interesting with which they had no concern. Instead, therefore, of the stale and hackneyed subject, a couple of lovers led through every difficulty and danger which the author could possibly contrive to throw in their way, to be at length crowned with felicity and marriage, he shows us a man struggling for the acquisition of wealth, and getting rich at all events, by fair means or foul. Of love, at least the sentimental part of it, he clearly has no notion; and marriage, if it happens to be mentioned at all, is quite by the way, purely incidental to the main action, and never allowed to interrupt the grand business of life. When the hero has made his fortune, the author lays down his pen the interest of the story is at an end.

"De Foe himself, during the greater part of his troubled life, laboured under pecuniary difficulties, and, in the end, is said to have died insolvent. It would seem, therefore, that he was resolved to feast his imagination with what he could not enjoy in reality; and as he felt the miseries of poverty in his own person, and was probably always speculating for the acquisition of wealth, he was naturally led to consider it the most interesting pursuit in which his hero could possibly be engaged. Whatever truth there may be in this, the propensity to accumulate ideal riches is everywhere clearly evinced. If his imagination ever grows wanton, it is in some dream of ideal wealth; if it ever warms, it is in the recital of some brisk trade which his hero is driving at a profit of a hundred per cent. With what complacency will he enumerate the several articles of a rich booty, no matter how obtained. How he revels in the idea of a stream that rolls down sands of gold, or an El-Dorado, where it is to be had for picking up, or an oysterbed, where every oyster contains a pearl of immense price! He is never contented with small gains, or fond of imagining unsuccessful speculations, but delights in a lucky adventure, and enriching his hero with the proceeds; to abandon him, indeed, in poverty, seems to him as contrary to all rule as any other novelist would consider it to leave his

principal personage unmarried. But this is a disposition altogether unheroic, and savours so little of romance, the employment and pursuits of his fictitious heroes constitute so completely the business of the class of people from whom they are taken, and the arts and practices they have recourse to are so much in the way of the world, that we never suspect these matter-of-fact personages of being the unsubstantial creatures of mere invention.

"The grand secret of his art, however, if art it can be called, and were not rather an instinct, consists doubtless of the astonishing minuteness of the details, and the circumstantial particularity with which everything is laid before us. It is by this, perhaps, more than anything else, that fictitious narratives are distinguishable from the genuine memoirs of those who have been eye-witnesses of what they relate. The facts in the one case may be as probable as in the other, the descriptions as vivid and striking, the style as natural and unconstrained; still there is an indefinable something which seems to be wanting to the former, though we may not have remarked its presence in the latter. Some unimportant particular, some minute circumstance, which none but he who had seen it with his own eyes would have thought of remarking, will always serve, like the scarcely discernible lines on a genuine note, to distinguish between the true and the counterfeit. The eye of imagination, however strong and piercing, cannot always pervade the whole scene, and see everything distinctly; the more prominent features, indeed, it may develope with the clearness and accuracy of an almost unclouded vision, but all besides is either obscured with mist, or lost in impenetrable shade; and he who paints from the ideal must consequently either leave these parts unfinished, or spread his colours at random. It is the singular merit of De Foe to have overcome this difficulty, and to have communicated to his fictitious narratives every characteristic mark by which we distinguish between real and pretended adventures. The whole scene lay expanded before him in the fulness of light and life, and, down to the minutest particular, everything is delineated with truth and accuracy. It is not necessary that we should have the light fall advantageously, or wink with our eyes, in order to make the delusion complete, by hiding the defects and softening down the harsh lines of the representation; the most penetrating gaze, aided by the strongest light, cannot detect the imposition, or distinguish between the shade and the substance. Writers of fiction may, in general, be said rather to shadow forth than fully to delineate their visions, either because they flit away too early, or are never seen with sufficient distinctness; like the first discoverers of countries, they trace out a few promontories on their chart, and give a faint outline of something indistinctly seen. In the solitude of his closet, De Foe could travel round the world in idea, seeing everything with the distinctness of natural vision, and noting everything with the minuteness of the most accurate observer. His chart presents us not merely with the bold headland, shooting forth into the deep, or the clearly defined mountain that rises into middle air behind; we have the whole coast fully and fairly traced out, with the soundings of every bay, the direction of every current, and the quarter of every wind that blows.

"The possession of this marvellous faculty has enabled him to communicate such an air of truth and reality to his fictions, that we are inclined to doubt whether human life was ever before, or has ever since been, so faithfully represented, and to suspect that every other author has, more or less, exaggerated or distorted, exalted or debased, the nature from which he drew. It may appear to savour somewhat of paradox, but we will venture to affirm that De Foe was not more indebted for this superiority to the possession of the single faculty we have mentioned, than to the want of those other powers by which more highly-gifted authors have been distinguished. These latter have enabled their possessors to excite every emotion in their readers which the human breast is capable of feeling, but at the same time they have unfitted them to be the humble

copyists of nature, and the faithful historians of human life. We mean not to deny that nature formed the ground-work of their fictions, and supplied the elements of their characters, but it was nature wrought up to a higher pitch, and raised far above the level of common life. In their plots, for instance, instead of the ordinary number of events which would naturally arise in the course of any series of years, we find an assemblage of strange and diverting incidents, such as never occur in the experience of one man, or of any given number of men. The imaginary persons who occupy the several scenes of this drama are not only of much larger proportions than ordinary people, but form a collection of curious and eccentric characters, such as were never crowded together in any single stage of real life. Their wit, instead of flowing in the scanty stream in which it really pervades the intercourse of fashionable life, is poured along in a mighty tide, of which the most brilliant society furnishes no example; their dialogue is not the conversation of gentlemen, but the combat of intellectual gladiators. Their humour is a concentration of all the humour of all mankind, and runs through their works in a vein so rich as at every page to excite the laugh that will not be controlled, whereas the dull and serious drama of the world seldom furnishes just occasion for even a smile. The passions, as they are portrayed by these writers, have an energy and terror more than mortal; and grief, in particular,-an uninviting thing enough in the world of real woe,is clothed with such an air of elegance and refinement, that it becomes a luxury in spite of fact, and is called the joy of grief, the favourite paradox of sickly poets. Then their descriptions of the visible world have a splendour and an illusion inconsistent with the sobriety of reality, and, instead of reminding the reader of earthly scenes, fill his imagination with the wonders of paradise, and the fabled glories of Elysium. Then would they present us, not with a chapter or two of human life, but an epitome of the whole, in which every detail is abridged, and none but the most surprising events fully developed. All that the writer's experience can furnish of the curious and diverting, whether facts or characters, gathered from every scene of life, and from among every class of men, is crowded into the narrative of a few years, and concentrated on a single stage. This quick succession of incidents, in themselves strange and various, together with the strong contrast produced by the opposition of character, eccentric or exaggerated, produces an effect delightful to the imagination, but no more resembling the tenour of real life than a landscape, in which the productions of all climates and seasons should be grouped together, would be like a scene of the true picturesque. To delight and astonish are perhaps the legitimate ends of fiction, and it may be necessary to heighten every colour, and strengthen every shade, in order to produce this effect. We will go still further, and allow that even, for the purposes of instruction, it may be expedient to exaggerate and embellish, in like manner as extreme cases are put to demonstrate truths, which escape our observation in the course of actual experience. But whilst the reader, especially the youthful one, is delighted and astonished, perhaps instructed; yet since the characters with whom he converses in the world of fiction are so humorous and eccentric, their wit so brilliant and redundant, the turns of fortune so strange and unexpected, he is led either to form a very erroneous estimate of real life, or, if his limited experience enable him to correct his judgment, is inspired with a premature and morbid distaste for its comparative languor and insipidity.

"We shall perhaps illustrate our meaning by an actual comparison, in one or two instances, between De Foe and the writers to whom we have alluded. Both he and Smollett have given us successful representations of a sailor's life, but in a very different style, and with very different effect. De Foe's sailor is of the ordinary description of men, one out of a thousand, with nothing very striking or characteristic about him; the sailor in Smollett is altogether an extraordinary being, whose every action is uncouth, and every expression ludicrous. The one has the usual marks of a sailor, but has every