This excellent plan of instruction was carried out with incomparable brilliancy of method, and vivacity of style.  Defoe was thoroughly master of his subject; he had read every history that he could lay his hands on, and his connexion with King William had guided him to the mainsprings of political action, and fixed in his mind clear principles for England’s foreign policy.  Such a mass of facts and such a maze of interests would have encumbered and perplexed a more commonplace intellect, but Defoe handled them with experienced and buoyant ease.  He had many arts for exciting attention.  His confinement in Newgate, from which the first number of the Review was issued on the 19th February, 1704, had in no way impaired his clear-sighted daring and self-confident skill.  There was a sparkle of paradox and a significant lesson in the very title of his journal—­A Review of the Affairs of France.  When, by and by, he digressed to the affairs of Sweden and Poland, and filled number after number with the history of Hungary, people kept asking, “What has this to do with France?” “How little you understand my design,” was Defoe’s retort.  “Patience till my work is completed, and then you will see that, however much I may seem to have been digressing, I have always kept strictly to the point.  Do not judge me as you judged St. Paul’s before the roof was put on.  It is not affairs in France that I have undertaken to explain, but the affairs of France; and the affairs of France are the affairs of Europe.  So great is the power of the French money, the artifice of their conduct, the terror of their arms, that they can bring the greatest kings in Europe to promote their interest and grandeur at the expense of their own.”

Defoe delighted to brave common prejudice by throwing full in its face paradoxes expressed in the most unqualified language.  While we were at war with France, and commonplace hunters after popularity were doing their utmost to flatter the national vanity, Defoe boldly announced his intention of setting forth the wonderful greatness of the French nation, the enormous numbers of their armies, the immense wealth of their treasury, the marvellous vigour of their administration.  He ridiculed loudly those writers who pretended that we should have no difficulty in beating them, and filled their papers with dismal stories about the poverty and depopulation of the country.  “Consider the armies that the French King has raised,” cried Defoe, “and the reinforcements and subsidies he has sent to the King of Spain; does that look like a depopulated, country and an impoverished exchequer?” It was perhaps a melancholy fact, but what need to apologise for telling the truth?  At once, of course, a shout was raised against him for want of patriotism; he was a French pensioner, a Jacobite, a hireling of the Peace-party.  This was the opportunity on which the chuckling paradox-monger had counted.  He protested that he was not drawing a map of the French