supernatural, the author deliberately avoided any occasion for talking gossip or for indulging “persons of airy tempers” with sentimental love-tales.  “Instead of making them a bill of fare out of patchwork romances and polluting scandal,” reads the preface signed by Duncan Campbell, “the good old gentleman who wrote the adventures of my life has made it his business to treat them with a great variety of entertaining passages which always terminate in morals that tend to the edification of all readers, of whatsoever sex, age, or profession.”  Those who came to consult the seer on affairs of the heart, therefore, received only the scantiest mention from his biographer, and never were the languishing and sighing of Mr. Campbell’s devotees described with any romantic glamor.  On the contrary, Defoe portrayed in terse and homely phrases the follies and affectations of the dumb man’s fair clients.  The young blooming beauty who found little Duncan “wallowing in the dust” and bribed him with a sugarplum to reveal the name of her future husband; the “sempstress with an itching desire for a parson”; housekeepers in search of stolen goods; the “widow who bounced” from one end of the room to the other and finally “scuttled too airily downstairs for a woman in her clothes”; and the chambermaid disguised as a fine lady, who by “the toss of her head, the jut of the bum, the sidelong leer of the eye” proclaimed her real condition—­these types are treated by Defoe in a blunt realistic manner entirely foreign to Eliza Haywood’s vein.  Some passages,[2] perhaps, by a sentiment too exalted or by a description in romantic style suggest the hand of another writer, possibly Mrs. Haywood, but more probably William Bond, in whose name the reprint of 1728 was issued.[3] But in the main, the book reflected Defoe’s strong tendency to speculate upon unusual and supernatural phenomena, and utterly failed to “divulge the secret intrigues and amours of one part of the sex, to give the other part room to make favorite scandal the subject of their discourse."[4]

That Defoe had refrained from treating one important aspect of Duncan Campbell’s activities he was well aware.  “If I was to tell his adventures with regard, for instance, to women that came to consult him, I might, perhaps, have not only written the stories of eleven thousand virgins that died maids, but have had the relations to give of as many married women and widows, and the work would have been endless."[5] In his biography of the Scotch prophet he does not propose to clog the reader with any adventures save the most remarkable and those in various ways mysterious.