of purpose.  This zeal for reform marks all his numerous works, and accounts for the moralizing to be found everywhere.  Third, Defoe was a journalist and pamphleteer, with a reporter’s eye for the picturesque and a newspaper man’s instinct for making a “good story.”  He wrote an immense number of pamphlets, poems, and magazine articles; conducted several papers,—­one of the most popular, the Review, being issued from prison,—­and the fact that they often blew hot and cold upon the same question was hardly noticed.  Indeed, so extraordinarily interesting and plausible were Defoe’s articles that he generally managed to keep employed by the party in power, whether Whig or Tory.  This long journalistic career, lasting half a century, accounts for his direct, simple, narrative style, which holds us even now by its intense reality.  To Defoe’s genius we are also indebted for two discoveries, the “interview” and the leading editorial, both of which are still in daily use in our best newspapers.

The fourth fact to remember is that Defoe knew prison life; and thereby hangs a tale.  In 1702 Defoe published a remarkable pamphlet called “The Shortest Way with the Dissenters,” supporting the claims of the free churches against the “High Fliers,” i.e.  Tories and Anglicans.  In a vein of grim humor which recalls Swift’s “Modest Proposal,” Defoe advocated hanging all dissenting ministers, and sending all members of the free churches into exile; and so ferociously realistic was the satire that both Dissenters and Tories took the author literally.  Defoe was tried, found guilty of seditious libel, and sentenced to be fined, to stand three days in the pillory, and to be imprisoned.  Hardly had the sentence been pronounced when Defoe wrote his “Hymn to the Pillory,”—­

    Hail hieroglyphic state machine,
    Contrived to punish fancy in,—­

a set of doggerel verses ridiculing his prosecutors, which Defoe, with a keen eye for advertising, scattered all over London.  Crowds flocked to cheer him in the pillory; and seeing that Defoe was making popularity out of persecution, his enemies bundled him off to Newgate prison.  He turned this experience also to account by publishing a popular newspaper, and by getting acquainted with rogues, pirates, smugglers, and miscellaneous outcasts, each one with a “good story” to be used later.  After his release from prison, in 1704, he turned his knowledge of criminals to further account, and entered the government employ as a kind of spy or secret-service agent.  His prison experience, and the further knowledge of criminals gained in over twenty years as a spy, accounts for his numerous stories of thieves and pirates, Jonathan Wild and Captain Avery, and also for his later novels, which deal almost exclusively with villains and outcasts.