it to exhaustion, putting the ore into various shapes to attract different purchasers. Robinson Crusoe made a sensation; he immediately followed up the original story with a Second Part, and the Second Part with a volume of Serious Reflections.  He had discovered the keenness of the public appetite for stories of the supernatural, in 1706, by means of his True Relation of the Apparition of one Mrs. Veal.[4] When, in 1720, he undertook to write the life of the popular fortune-teller, Duncan Campbell—­a puff which illustrates almost better than anything else Defoe’s extraordinary ingenuity in putting a respectable face upon the most disreputable materials—­he had another proof of the avidity with which people run to hear marvels.  He followed up this clue with A System of Magic, or a History of the Black Art; The Secrets of the Invisible World disclosed, or a Universal History of Apparitions; and a humorous History of the Devil, in which last work he subjected Paradise Lost, to which Addison had drawn attention by his papers in the Spectator, to very sharp criticism.  In his books and pamphlets on the Behaviour of Servants, and his works of more formal instruction, the Family Instructor, the Plan of English Commerce, the Complete English Tradesman, the Complete English Gentleman (his last work, left unfinished and unpublished), he wrote with a similar regard to what was for the moment in demand.

[Footnote 4:  Mr. Lee has disposed conclusively of the myth that this tale was written to promote the sale of a dull book by one Drelincourt on the Fear of Death, which Mrs. Veal’s ghost earnestly recommended her friend to read.  It was first published separately as a pamphlet without any reference to Drelincourt.  It was not printed with Drelincourt’s Fear of Death till the fourth edition of that work, which was already popular.  Further, the sale of Drelincourt does not appear to have been increased by the addition of Defoe’s pamphlet to the book, and of Mrs. Veal’s recommendation to the pamphlet.]

Defoe’s novel-writing thus grew naturally out of his general literary trade, and had not a little in common with the rest of his abundant stock.  All his productions in this line, his masterpiece, Robinson Crusoe, as well as what Charles Lamb calls his “secondary novels,” Captain Singleton, Colonel Jack, Moll Flanders, and Roxana, were manufactured from material for which he had ascertained that there was a market; the only novelty lay in the mode of preparation.  From writing biographies with real names attached to them, it was but a short step to writing biographies with fictitious names.  Defoe is sometimes spoken of as the inventor of the realistic novel; realistic biography would, perhaps, be a more strictly accurate description.  Looking at the character of his professed records of fact, it seems strange that he