of his negotiations were “written by himself,” and “done out of French.”  Defoe knew that the public would read such narratives more eagerly if they believed them to be true, and ascribed them to authors whose position entitled them to confidence.  There can be little doubt that he drew upon his imagination for more than the title-pages.  But why, when he had so many eminent and notorious persons to serve as his subjects, with all the advantage of bearing names about which the public were already curious, did he turn to the adventures of new and fictitious heroes and heroines?  One can only suppose that he was attracted by the greater freedom of movement in pure invention; he made the venture with Robinson Crusoe, it was successful, and he repeated it.  But after the success of Robinson Crusoe, he by no means abandoned his old fields.  It was after this that he produced autobiographies and other prima facie authentic lives of notorious thieves and pirates.  With all his records of heroes, real or fictitious, he practised the same devices for ensuring credibility.  In all alike he took for granted that the first question people would ask about a story was whether it was true.  The novel, it must be remembered, was then in its infancy, and Defoe, as we shall presently see, imagined, probably not without good reason, that his readers would disapprove of story-telling for the mere pleasure of the thing, as an immorality.

In writing for the entertainment of his own time, Defoe took the surest way of writing for the entertainment of all time.  Yet if he had never chanced to write Robinson Crusoe, he would now have a very obscure place in English literature.  His “natural infirmity of homely plain writing,” as he humorously described it, might have drawn students to his works, but they ran considerable risk of lying in utter oblivion.  He was at war with the whole guild of respectable writers who have become classics; they despised him as an illiterate fellow, a vulgar huckster, and never alluded to him except in terms of contempt.  He was not slow to retort their civilities; but the retorts might very easily have sunk beneath the waters, while the assaults were preserved by their mutual support.  The vast mass of Defoe’s writings received no kindly aid from distinguished contemporaries to float them down the stream; everything was done that bitter dislike and supercilious indifference could do to submerge them. Robinson Crusoe was their sole life-buoy.

It would be a mistake to suppose that the vitality of Robinson Crusoe is a happy accident, and that others of Defoe’s tales have as much claim in point of merit to permanence. Robinson Crusoe has lived longest, because it lives most, because it was detached as it were from its own time and organized for separate existence.  It is the only one of Defoe’s tales that shows what he could do as an artist.  We might have seen from the others