(Defoe wrote an enormous number of pamphlets; for great part of his life he might almost have been described as a pamphleteer pure and simple.  In the vast lists of publications which his biographers and bibliographers have compiled, partly by industry and partly by imagination, by far the larger number of entries is of the pamphlet kind.  Indeed, as most people know, Defoe did not take to the composition of the fiction which has made his name famous till very late in life.  Born in the year 1661, he began pamphleteering when he was scarcely of age, and continued in that way (with occasional excursions into work larger in scale, but not very different in style or matter) for nearly forty years before the publication of Robinson Crusoe_.  His two most famous and most effective pamphlets were the so-called Legion Letter and The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (given here), to which may perhaps be added the Reasons against War with France.  All these, with many others, appeared within the compass of the years 1700-1702.  The three together touched upon the three most burning questions of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—­parliamentary factiousness, an aggressive policy abroad, and toleration at home.  Little or no annotation is required for their comprehension, but the reader may amuse himself if he likes by meditating whether the Shortest Way is irony or not.  My own opinion is that it is not; being a simple statement of the actual views of the other side.  The anecdotic history of the piece—­how it was taken for serious by both sides, was prosecuted by Government, the author proclaimed, and a reward offered for his detection; how, the printer and publisher being arrested, Defoe surrendered, was tried, pleaded guilty, was fined, pilloried, and imprisoned—­may be read in the biographies.  His imprisonment lasted till August 1704, when Harley let him out, and he entered upon a course of rather mysterious service as a Government free-lance, which was continued under various ministries, and has not on the whole brought him credit with posterity.  For many years, his remarkable Review, a political journal which he conducted single-handed, served as his chief organ; but he never gave up writing pamphlets till his death in 1731, though he never approached either the merit or the effect of that here given._)

Sir Roger L’Estrange tells us a story in his collection of fables, of the cock and the horses.  The cock was gotten to roost in the stable among the horses, and there being no racks or other conveniences for him, it seems he was forced to roost upon the ground.  The horses jostling about for room, and putting the cock in danger of his life, he gives them this grave advice, ’Pray, gentlefolks, let us stand still, for fear we should tread upon one another.’

There are some people in the world, who now they are unperched, and reduced to an equality with other people, and under strong and very just apprehensions of being further treated as they deserve, begin, with AEsop’s cock, to preach up peace and union, and the Christian duties of moderation, forgetting that, when they had the power in their hands, these graces were strangers in their gates.