to be useful, writes to serve you, and at the same time, by an imperceptible art, draws you on to be pleased also.  He represents truth with plainness, virtue with praise; he even reprehends with a softness that carries the force of a satire without the salt of it; and he insensibly screws himself into your good opinion, that as his writings merit your regard, so they fail not to obtain it.”

“This is part of the character by which I define a good writer; I say ’tis but part of it, for it is not a half sheet that would contain the full description; a large volume would hardly suffice it.  His fame requires, indeed, a very good writer to give it due praise; and for that reason (and a good reason too) I go no farther with it.”

CHAPTER IX.

THE PLACE OF DEFOE’S FICTIONS IN HIS LIFE.

Those of my readers who have thought of Defoe only as a writer of stories which young and old still love to read, must not be surprised that so few pages of this little book should be left for an account of his work in that field.  No doubt Defoe’s chief claim to the world’s interest is that he is the author of Robinson Crusoe.  But there is little to be said about this or any other of Defoe’s tales in themselves.  Their art is simple, unique, incommunicable, and they are too well known to need description.  On the other hand, there is much that is worth knowing and not generally known about the relation of these works to his life, and the place that they occupy in the sum total of his literary activity.  Hundreds of thousands since Defoe’s death, and millions in ages to come, would never have heard his name but for Robinson Crusoe.  To his contemporaries the publication of that work was but a small incident in a career which for twenty years had claimed and held their interest.  People in these days are apt to imagine, because Defoe wrote the most fascinating of books for children, that he was himself simple, child-like, frank, open, and unsuspecting.  He has been so described by more than one historian of literature.  It was not so that he appeared to his contemporaries, and it is not so that he can appear to us when we know his life, unless we recognise that he took a child’s delight in beating with their own weapons the most astute intriguers in the most intriguing period of English history.

Defoe was essentially a journalist.  He wrote for the day, and for the greatest interest of the greatest number of the day.  He always had some ship sailing with the passing breeze, and laden with a useful cargo for the coast upon which the wind chanced to be blowing.  If the Tichborne trial had happened in his time, we should certainly have had from him an exact history of the boyhood and surprising adventures of Thomas Castro, commonly known as Sir Roger, which would have come down to us as a true record, taken, perhaps, by the chaplain of Portland prison from the