Chapter XX: Front Matter (20)

‘The king (after the Prince of Orange had entered London) had proceeded to the Kentish coast, and embarked on board a vessel with the intention of going to France; but being detained by the wind, Sir Edward Hales, one of his attendants, sent his footman to the post-office at Feversham, where his livery was recognised. Being traced to the vessel, it was immediately boarded by some people from the town, who, mistaking the king for a popish priest, searched his person, and took from him four hundred guineas, with some valuable seals and jewels. The rank of the individual treated with so much indignity was not long undiscovered; for, there being a constable present who happened to know him, he threw himself at his feet, and, begging him to forgive the rudeness of the mob, ordered restitution of what had been taken from him. The king, receiving the jewels and seals, distributed the money amongst them. After this, he was conducted to Feversham, where fresh insults were heaped upon fallen majesty.’—‘While there, he found himself in the hands of the rabble, who, upon the noise of the king’s being taken, thronged from all parts of the country to Feversham, so that the king found himself surrounded, as it were, with an army of furies; the whole street, which is very wide and large, being filled, and thousands of the noisy gentry got together. His majesty, who knew well enough the temper of the people at that time, but not what they might be pushed on to do at such a juncture, was very uneasy, and spoke to some of the gentlemen, who came with more respect, and more like themselves, to the town on that surprising occasion. The king told them he was in their hands, and was content to be so, and they might do what they pleased with him; but whatever they thought fit to do, he desired they would quiet the people, and not let him be delivered up to the rabble, to be torn in pieces. The gentlemen told his majesty they were sorry to see him used so ill, and would do any thing in their power to protect him; but that it was not possible to quell the tumult of the people. The king was distressed in the highest degree; the people shouting and pressing in a frightful manner to have the door opened. At length, his majesty observing a forward gentleman among the crowd, who ran from one party to another, hallooing and animating the people, the king sent to tell him he desired to speak with him. The message was delivered with all possible civility, and the little Masaniello was prevailed with to come up stairs. The king received him with a courtesy rather equal to his present circumstances than to his dignity; told him, what he was doing might have an event worse than he intended; that he seemed to be heating the people up for some mischief; and that as he had done him no personal wrong, why should he attack him in this manner; that he was in their hands, and they might do what they pleased; but he hoped they did not design to murder him. The fellow stood, as it were, thunderstruck, and said not one word. The king, proceeding, told him he found he had some influence with the rabble, and desired he would pacify them; that messengers were gone to the parliament at London, and that he desired only they would be quiet till their return. What the fellow answered to the king I know not; but as I immediately enquired, they told me he did not say much, but this—“What can I do with them? and, what would you have me do?” But as soon as the king had done speaking, he turned short, and made to the door as fast as he could to go out of the room. As soon as he got fairly to the stairhead, and saw his way open, he turns short about to the gentlemen, to one of whom he had given the same churlish answer, and raising his voice, so that the king, who was in the next room, should be sure to hear him, he says, “_I have a bag of money as long as my arm, halloo, boys, halloo!_” The king was so filled with contempt and just indignation at the low-spirited insolence of the purse-proud wretch, that it quite took off the horror of the rabble, and only smiling, he sat down and said, “Let them alone, let them do their worst.”’

It seems the man was a retired grocer; and Defoe, in his _Complete Tradesman_, (says his biographer,) relates the circumstance, to show, that to be vain of mere wealth denotes a baseness of soul, and is often accompanied by a conduct unworthy of a rational creature.

In the midst of his distress, the King, it appears, had applied for protection to a clergyman, who treated him with cool indifference. The fact is thus noticed by Defoe:

‘When the king was taken at Sheerness, and had fallen into the hands of the rabble, he applied himself to a clergyman who was there, in words to this effect: “Sir, it is men of your cloth who have reduced me to this condition; I desire you will use your endeavours to still and quiet the people, and disperse them, that I may be freed from this tumult.” The gentleman’s answer was cold and insignificant; and going down to the people, he returned no more to the king. Several of the gentry and clergy thereabouts,’ adds our author, ‘who had formerly preached and talked up this mad doctrine, (passive obedience,) never offered the king their assistance in that distress, which, as a man, whether prince or no, any one would have done: it therefore to me renders their integrity suspected, when they pretended to an absolute submission, and only meant that they expected it from their neighbours, whom they designed to oppress, but resolved never to practise the least part of it themselves, if ever it should look towards them.’

In another place, Defoe observes,

‘I never was, I thank God for it, one of those that betrayed him, or any one else. I was never one that flattered him in his arbitrary proceedings, or made him believe I would bear oppression and injustice with a tame Issachar-like temper; those who did so, and then flew in his face, I believe, as much betrayed him as Judas did our Saviour; and their crime, whatever the Protestant interest gained by it, is no way lessened by the good that followed.’

The same spirit of integrity and candour, the same desire to see fair play, and to do justice to all parties,—in a word, the same spirit of common sense and common honesty which marks this passage, runs through all Defoe’s writings; and as it raised him up a host of enemies among the abettors and abusers of power, so it left him neither friends nor shelter in his own party, to whose faults and errors he gave as little quarter; thinking himself bound to condemn them as freely and frankly. Hence he had a life of uneasiness,—an old age of pain. In reading the above description of James’s situation, the hand is passed thoughtfully over the brow, and we for a moment forget the crimes of the monarch in the misfortunes of the man. It is laid down by Mr. Burke, that none but mild, inoffensive princes, ever bring themselves to the condition of being objects of insult or pity to their subjects; and that tyrants, who deserve punishment, know well how to guard themselves against it, and ‘to keep their seats firm.’ Let us see how far this doctrine is made good in the case of James; or how far his own misdeeds brought their rare, but natural punishment upon his head. We will let Mr. Wilson speak to this point:—

‘The fate of James,’ he says, ‘would have been more entitled to pity, if he had not stained his character by so many acts of wanton and cold-blooded cruelty. That his merciless character was well known to the nation, appears by the intrepid retort of Colonel Ayloffe, who had been condemned to death, but was advised by James to make some disclosures, it being in his power to pardon. “I know,” says he, “it is in your power, but it is not in your nature, to pardon.” That compassion was a total stranger to his breast, no one can doubt who reads the following affecting narrative: Monsieur Roussel, a French protestant divine of great learning and integrity, and minister of the Reformed Church at Montpelier in France, having witnessed the demolition of his own place of worship, soon after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, ventured, at the desire of his people, to preach in the night-time upon its ruins, and was attended by some thousands of his flock. For this offence he was condemned, by the intendant of Languedoc, to be broke upon the wheel; but, having withdrawn from the place, it was ordered that he should be hanged in effigy. After encountering numerous hazards, he succeeded in effecting his escape from France; and reaching Ireland, was chosen pastor of the French church in Dublin. James, who, for the sake of courting popularity, had formerly affected a charitable disposition towards the French refugees, threw off the mask when he landed in that country, and was surrounded by French counsellors. Being no longer under any temptation to disguise his natural temper and his hatred to the reformed religion, he committed one of those breaches of good faith which must for ever consign his name to infamy. For, instead of protecting a stranger who had been persecuted in his own country for a conscientious discharge of his religious duties, and had sought an asylum under the laws of another, where he had lived for some years in peaceable exile, the base wretch delivered up this unoffending person to the French ambassador, Count D’Avaux, who sent him in chains to France, there to undergo the terrible punishment prepared for him by his inhuman murderers.[34] Such an action requires no comment; nor can any term of reproach be too strong to designate the monster who could lend himself to its perpetration.’

Yet many people, seeing the poor and forlorn figure which the exiled sovereign made with a few followers in the remote and silent court of St. Germain’s, wanted to have him back; thinking that, to curtail him of the power to repeat such acts as that just related, and to deluge a country with blood, was the last degree of hardship, and a sad indignity offered to a king! Defoe was not in the number of these sentimentalists; and he had enough to do after his countrymen’s ‘courage had been screwed to the sticking-place,’ to keep it there, and warn them against a relapse into Popery and slavery. One of his first publications had been an Address to the Dissenters, to caution them against accepting the terms of a general Toleration, which, on his accession to the throne, James II. had insidiously held out to all parties, and which was to include Papists as well as Dissenters. This was not a bait for Defoe’s keen jealousy and strong repugnance to the encroachments of power to be taken in by. There was, however, some danger that the Dissenters, from their timidity and love of ease, and their being habitually too much engrossed by themselves and their own grievances, might be tempted to purchase the proffered grace at the price of allowing the Papists the same liberty; which was (at this period), under the barefaced pretence of liberality, and a tenderness for scrupulous consciences, to throw open the flood-gates of the most unbounded bigotry and intolerance. But the hatred and dread of Popery was, at this time, the ruling passion, in which the Dissenters shared in its utmost rancour and virulence; and this old grudge and hereditary antipathy had the effect of counteracting their natural coldness and phlegm, and a certain narrowness and formality in their views. Some of the weakest among them were, notwithstanding, for running into the snare, and did not easily forgive Defoe for pointing it out to them. The Marquis of Halifax had written a pamphlet on the same side of the question, called, ‘A Letter to a Dissenter, upon occasion of his Majesty’s late Declaration of Indulgence, 1687.’ The title of Defoe’s work is not now known. In speaking of it himself, some years after, he says,

‘The next time I differed with my friends was when King James was wheedling the Dissenters to take off the penal laws and test, which I could by no means come into. And as in the first I used to say, I had rather the Popish House of Austria should ruin the Protestants in Hungary than the infidel House of Ottoman should ruin both Protestant and Papist by overrunning Germany; so, in the other, I told the Dissenters I had rather the Church of England should pull our clothes off by fines and forfeitures, than that the Papists should fall both upon the Church and the Dissenters, and pull our skins off by fire and faggot.’[35]

The allusion in the foregoing passage is to an early Piece of Defoe’s, (not reprinted among his tracts), in which he had drawn his sword (for his weapon would be out) in defence of the Pope against the Turks. The occasion was this: The Hungarian Reformers having been persecuted and proscribed by the Austrian monarch, had risen in arms against him; and the Turks, availing themselves of the opportunity, had marched to their assistance, and laid siege to Vienna. Most of the English Protestants (as men think the nearest danger greatest, and hate their old enemies most,) were inclined to rejoice at this tumbling of a Popish despot, and the success of their Hungarian brethren. But Defoe, who saw farther than others, (and perhaps took a little pride in doing so,) viewed the matter in a different light, and deprecated the possible triumph of the Crescent over the Cross, and the subjugation of all Christendom, which might be the consequence. Logically speaking, he was right; but prudentially, he was perhaps wrong. The powers of Europe took the alarm as well as he, and combined to rescue the Austrian monarch from the gripe of the Mussulman. They succeeded; but could obtain no terms for the Hungarian peasants. Had the Emperor been left to fight his own battles against the Turks, he might have been frightened into measures of moderation and justice towards his own subjects; and there was, in the meantime, little probability of a Mahometan army overrunning Europe.

Defoe’s first publication was a satirical pamphlet, called _Speculum Crape-gownorum_; intended to ridicule the fopperies and affectation of the younger clergy, as a set-off to some severe attacks on the mode of preaching among the Dissenters. This performance bears the date of 1682, when Defoe was only twenty-one, so that he commenced author very young. From that period he hardly ever ceased writing for the rest of his life; and a list of his works would alone fill a long article. The pasquinade just mentioned is attributed, by Mr. Godwin, in his _Lives of the Philipses_, to John Philips; but Mr. Wilson gives it to Defoe, on his own authority; and certainly his report is to be trusted, for he was a person of unchallengeable veracity. He was always a warm partisan of the Dissenters, (among whom he was born and bred,) and was ever ready to take up their quarrel either with wit or argument, for which he got small thanks. He was not, however, to be put off by their dulness or ingratitude. He was old enough to remember the times of their persecution and ‘fiery ordeal;’ and it is at this source that the spirit of liberty is tempered and steeled to its keenest edge. Defoe’s political firmness may, in part, also be traced to this union between the feelings of civil and religious liberty. An attachment to freedom, for the advantages it holds out to society, may be sometimes overruled by a calculation of prudence, or of the opposite advantages held out to the individual; but a resistance to power for conscience-sake, and as a dictate of religious duty, rests on a positive ground, which is not to be shaken or tampered with, and has the seeds of permanence and martyrdom in it. What Mr. Burke calls ‘the _Hortus Siccus_ of Dissent’ is therefore the hotbed of resistance to the encroachments of ambition; and when, by long-continued struggles, the disqualifications of Dissenters are taken off, and the zeal which had been kept alive by hard usage and penal laws subsides into indifference or scepticism, we doubt whether there is any lever left, in mere public opinion, strong enough to throw off the pressure of unjust and ruinous power.

With these feelings, and, after the fears which he and all good men must have entertained for the safety of their religion, and the freedom of their country, it is not to be wondered at if Defoe hailed the arrival of the Prince of Orange with the greatest joy. He kept the anniversary of his landing, the 4th of November, all his life after. We find an account of him as one of those who went in procession with their Majesties to Guildhall, as a guard of honour, the year following. Oldmixon, who gives the account, has mixed up with it some of his unfounded prejudices against our author:

‘Their Majesties,’ he says, ‘attended (Oct. 29, 1689,) by their royal highnesses the Prince and Princesses of Denmark, and by a numerous train of nobility and gentry, went first to a balcony, prepared for them at the Angel in Cheapside, to see the show; which, for the great number of livery-men, the full appearance of the militia and artillery company, the rich adornments of the pageants, and the splendour and good order of the whole proceeding, out-did all that had been seen before upon that occasion; and what deserved to be particularly mentioned, says a reverend historian, was a royal regiment of volunteer-horse, made up of the chief citizens, who, being gallantly mounted and richly accoutred, were led by the Earl of Monmouth, now Earl of Peterborough, and attended their Majesties from Whitehall. Among these troopers, who were, for the most part, Dissenters, was Daniel Defoe, at that time a hosier in Freeman’s-yard, Cornhill; the same who afterwards was pilloried for writing an ironical invective against the Church; and did after that list in the service of Mr. Robert Harley, and those brethren of his who broke the confederacy, and made a shameful and ruinous peace with France.’[36]

Oldmixon evidently singles out his brother author in this gallant procession with an eye of envy rather than friendship; and the invidious turn given to his politics only means, that all those were _black sheep_ who did not go the absurd lengths of Oldmixon and his party in every thing.

The joy and exultation of Defoe on this great and glorious occasion was not of long duration, but was soon turned to gall and bitterness. ‘Though that his joy was joy,’ yet both friends and foes laboured hard to ‘throw such changes of vexation on it, that it might lose all colour.’ His admiration of King William was the ruling passion of his life. He was his hero, his deliverer, his friend: he was bound to him by the ties of patriotism, of religion, and of personal obligation. But this ruling passion was also the torment of his breast, because his well-grounded enthusiasm was not seconded by the unanimous public voice, and because the services of the great champion of liberty and of the Protestant cause did not meet with that glow of gratitude and affection in the minds of the people (when their immediate danger was blown over) that they richly merited. Defoe had not only ridden in procession with his Majesty, but he was afterwards closeted with him, and consulted by him on more than one question: so that his self-importance, as well as his sense of truth and justice, was implicated in the attacks which were made on the person and character of his royal patron and benefactor. Nothing can, in our opinion, exceed the good behaviour of William, nor the ill return he received from those he had been sent for, to deliver them from Popish bondage and darkness. Being no longer bowed to the earth by a yoke that they could not lift, and having got a king of their own choosing, they thought they could not exercise their new-acquired liberty and independence better than by using him as ill as possible, and reviling him for the very blessings which he had been the chief means of bestowing on them, and which his presence was absolutely necessary to continue to them. Having seen their hereditary, _passive-obedience_ monarch, King James, quietly seated on the other side of the Channel, and being no longer in bodily fear of being executed as rebels, or burnt as heretics, the good people of England began to find a flaw in the title of the new-made monarch, because he was not, and did not pretend to be, absolute; and to sacrifice to the _manes_ of divine right, by taking every opportunity, and resorting to every artifice to insult his person, to revile his reputation, to wound his feelings, and to cramp and thwart his measures for his own and their common safety. The Tories and high-fliers lamented that the crown was without its most precious jewel and ornament, _hereditary right_; and though they acknowledged the necessity of the case upon which they themselves had acted, yet they thought the time might come when this necessity might cease, and for their lawful King to be brought back again, ‘with conditions.’ Pulpits, long accustomed to unqualified submission, now echoed the double-tongued distinction of a king _de jure_ and a king _de facto_. This party, whose old habits were inimical to the new order of things, but who made a virtue of necessity, tendered their allegiance to the Prince of Orange reluctantly and ungraciously; while the Non-jurors bearded him to his face. The Country Gentlemen, (at that time a formidable party, ‘not pierceable by power of any argument,’) only felt themselves at a loss from not having the Dissenters and Nonconformists to hunt down as usual. William they regarded as an interloper, who had no rights of his own, and who hindered other people from exercising theirs, in molesting and domineering over their neighbours. What made matters worse, was his being a foreigner; his Dutch origin was one of the things constantly thrown in his teeth, and that staggered the faith and loyalty of many of his well-meaning subjects, who could not comprehend the relation in which they stood to a sovereign of alien descent. The phrase, _True-born Englishman_, became a watchword in the mouths of the malecontent party; and at that name, (as often as it was repeated), the Whig and Protestant interest grew pale. It was to meet, and finally quell this charge, that Defoe penned his well-known poem of _The True-born Englishman_—a satire which, if written in doggerel verse, and without the wit or pleasantry of Butler’s Hudibras, is a masterpiece of good sense and just reflection, and shows a thorough knowledge both of English history and of the English character. It is indeed a complete and unanswerable exposure of the pretence set up to a purer and loftier origin than all the rest of the world, instead of our being a mixed race from all parts of Europe, settling down into one common name and people. Defoe’s satire was so just and true, that it drove the cant, to which it was meant to be an antidote, out of fashion; and it was this piece of service that procured the writer the good opinion and notice of King William. It did not, however, equally recommend him to the public. If it silenced the idle and ill-natured clamours of a party, by telling the plain truth,—that truth was not the more welcome for being plain or effectual. Though this handle was thus taken from malevolence and discontent, the tide of unpopularity had set in too strong from the first arrival of the king, not to continue and increase to the end of his reign; so that at last worn out with rendering the noblest services, and being repaid with the meanest ingratitude, he thought of retiring to Holland, and leaving his English crown of thorns to any one who chose to claim it.

The state of parties, at this period of our history, presents a riddle that has not been solved. It has been referred to the gloom and discontent of the English character; but other countries have of late exhibited the same problem, with the same result. It may be resolved into that propensity in human nature, through which, when it has got what it wants, it requires something else which it cannot have. The English people, at the period in question, wanted a contradiction,—that is, to have James and William on the throne together; but this they could not have, and so they were contented with neither. If they had recalled James, they would have sent him back again. They wanted him back again _with conditions_, and security for his future good behaviour. They wanted his title to the throne without his abuse of power; an absolute sovereign, with a reserve of the privileges of the people; a Popish prince, with a Protestant church; a deliverance from chains without a deliverer; and an escape from tyranny without the stain of resistance to it. They wanted not out of two things one which they could have, but a third, which was impossible; and as they could not have all, they were determined to be pleased with nothing. This greatly annoyed Defoe, who set his face against so absurd a manifestation of the spirit of the times. It embittered his satisfaction in the virtues of the sovereign, and the glories of his reign,—in his exploits abroad,—the moderation and justice of his administration at home; nor was he consoled for the malignity of his prince’s enemies or the indifference of his friends, either by writing _Odes_ on his battles and victories, or _Elegies_ and _Epitaphs_ on his death.

He was still less fortunate in following up the dictates of what he thought right, or in what he called ‘speaking a word in season,’ in the subsequent reign. Queen Anne, who succeeded to the crown on the death of King William, was placed in no very graceful or dutiful position, as keeping her brother from the throne, which she occupied as the next Protestant heir, but to which, in the opinion of many, and perhaps in her own, he had a prior indefeasible right. She had been brought up with bigoted notions of religion; and in proportion as she felt the political ground infirm under her feet, she wished to stand well with the Church. There was, through her whole reign, therefore, a strong increasing bias to High-Church principles. The promise of toleration to the dissenters soon sunk into an _indulgence_, and ended in the threat and the intention of putting in force the severest laws against them, under pretence that the Church was in danger. The Clergy sung the same song as the Queen, adding a burden of their own to it;—breathing nothing in their sermons but suspicion and hatred of the dissenters, reviving and inflaming old animosities, and encouraging their parishioners to proceed even to open violence against the frequenters of conventicles. Their services in bringing about the Revolution were forgotten; and nothing was insisted on but their share in the great Rebellion, and the beheading of Charles I. A university preacher (Sacheverell) talked of ‘hoisting the bloody flag’ against the dissenters, and treated all those of the Moderate Party and Low Church as false brethren, who did not enlist under the banner. Another proposed shutting up not only the dissenters’ Meeting-Houses, but their Academies, and thus taking from them the education of their children. A third was for using gentle violence with the Queen to urge her to severe and salutary measures against Nonconformists; and considered her as under _duresse_ in not being allowed to give full scope to the sentiments labouring in her bosom in favour of the Church of England. Defoe marked all this with quick and anxious eye; he saw the storm of persecution gathering, and ready to burst with tenfold vengeance, from its having been so long delayed; he thought it high time to warn his brethren of the impending mischief, and to point out to the government, in a terrible and palpable way, the dangerous and mad career to which the zealots of a party were urging them headlong. ‘So should his anticipation prevent their discovery.’ He collected all the poisoned missiles and combustible materials he could lay his hands on, and putting them together in one heap, brought out his _Shortest Way with the Dissenters_. If it startled his adversaries and threw a blaze of light upon the subject, the explosion chiefly hurt himself. What beyond contradiction proved the truth of the satire was, that it was, at first, taken seriously by many of the opposite side, who thought it a well-timed and spirited Manifesto from a true son of the Church; and several young divines in the country, on perusing it, sent for more copies of it, with high commendations, as the triumph of their views and party. Their rage, when they found out their mistake, was proportionable, and no treatment was bad enough for so vile an incendiary. The book was forthwith prosecuted by authority, as a malignant slander against the Church, and a seditious libel on the government. The author, as before noticed, was sentenced to the pillory, and to a heavy fine, with imprisonment during the queen’s pleasure; which, as already mentioned, was the immediate and ultimate ruin of his affairs and prospects in life. Defoe bore his disgrace and misfortunes with the spirit of a man, and with a sort of grumbling patience peculiar to himself. He wrote on the occasion a _Hymn to the Pillory_, which contains some bad poetry and manly feeling; and indeed his apparent indifference is easily accounted for from a consciousness of the _flagrant_ rectitude of his case. Pope has made an ungenerous allusion to the circumstances in the _Dunciad_:—

‘See where on high stands unabash’d Defoe!’

Pope’s imagination had too much effeminacy to stomach, under any circumstances, this kind of petty, squalid martyrdom; nor had he strength of public principle enough to form to himself the practical antithesis of ‘dishonour honourable!’ The amiable in private life, the exalted in rank and station, alone fixed his sympathy, and engrossed his admiration. The exquisite compliments with which he has embalmed the memory of some of his illustrious friends, who stand ‘condemned to everlasting fame,’ are a discredit to his own. His apostrophe to Harley, beginning,

‘Oh soul supreme, in each hard instance tried,
Above all pain, all passion, and all pride,’

contrasts strangely with the time-serving, vain, versatile, and unprincipled character of that minister; and Mr. Wilson ought to have written a good book, for he has spoiled the effect of some of the finest lines in the English language. It was a bold step in Pope to put the author of _Robinson Crusoe_ into the _Dunciad_ at all; Swift also has a fling at him as ‘the fellow that was pilloried;’ and Gay is equally sceptical and pedantic, as to his possessing more than ‘the superficial parts of learning.’ We know of no excuse for the illiberality of the literary junto with regard to a man like Defoe, but that he returned the compliment to them; and in fact, if we were to take the character of men of genius from their judgment of each other, we must sometimes come to a very different conclusion from what the world have formed.

That Defoe should have incurred the hatred, and been consigned to the vengeance, of the High-Church party for thus honestly exposing their designs against the Dissenters, is but natural; the wonderful part is, that he equally excited the indignation and reproaches of the Dissenters themselves; who disclaimed his work as a scandalous and inflammatory performance, and called loudly (in concert with their bitterest foes,) for the condign punishment of the author. They almost with one voice, and as if seized with a contagion of folly, cried shame upon it, as an underhand and designing attempt to make a premature breach between them and the established church; to sow the seeds of groundless jealousy and ill-will; and to make them indirectly participators in, and the sufferers by, a scurrilous attack on the reverence due to religion and authority. Defoe was made the scapegoat of this paltry and cowardly policy, and was given up to the tender mercies of the opposite party without succour or sympathy. This extreme blindness to their own interests can only be explained by the consideration that the Dissenters, as a body, were at this time in a constant state of probation and suffering; they had enough to do with the evils they actually endured, without ‘flying to others that they knew not of;’ they stood in habitual awe and apprehension of their spiritual lords and masters;—would not be brought to suspect their further designs lest it should provoke them to realise their fears; and as they had not strength nor spirit to avert the blow, did not wish to see till they felt it. The alacrity and prowess of Defoe was a reproach to their backwardness; the truth of his appeal implied a challenge to meet it; and they answered, with the old excuse, ‘why troublest thou us before our time?’ The Dissenters too, at this period, were men of a formal and limited scope of mind, not much versed in the general march of human affairs; they required literal and positive proof for every thing, as well as for the points of faith on which they held out so manfully; and their obstinacy in maintaining these, and suffering for them, was matched by their timid circumspection and sluggish impracticability with respect to every thing else. Their deserting Defoe, who marched on at the head of the battle,—pushed forward by his keen foresight and natural impatience of wrong,—is not out of character; though equally repugnant to sound policy or true spirit. They fixed a stigma on him, therefore, as a breeder of strife, a false prophet, and a dangerous member of the community; and, what is certainly inexcusable, when, afterwards, his jest was turned to melancholy earnest;—when every thing he had foretold was verified to the very letter, when the whole force of the government was arrayed against them, and Sacheverell in person unfurled ‘his bloody flag,’ and paraded the streets with a mob at his heels, pulling down their meeting-houses, burning their private dwellings, and making it unsafe for a Dissenter to walk the streets,—they did not take off the stigma they had affixed to the author of _The Shortest Way with the Dissenters_; did not allow that he was right and they were wrong, but kept up their unjust and illiberal prejudices, and even aggravated them in some instances, as if to prove that they were well-founded. Bodies of men seldom retract or atone for the injuries they have done to individuals. It will hardly seem credible to the modern reader, that in pursuance of this old sectarian grudge, and in conformity with the same narrow spirit, some years after this, when Queen Anne, who, from the death of her son, Prince George, had no hope of leaving an heir to the crown, turned her thoughts to the restoration of the Pretender, and when Defoe, in the general alarm and agitation which this uncertainty of the designs of the Court occasioned, endeavoured to ridicule and defeat the project, by pointing out, in his powerful and inimitable way, the incalculable benefits that would ensue from setting aside the Hanoverian succession, and bringing in the right line, one William Benson, (a Dissenter, a stanch friend to the House of Hanover, and the same who had a monument erected to Milton,) in his absurd prejudice against Defoe,—in his conviction that he was a renegado and a Marplot, and in his utter incapacity to conceive the meaning of irony,—actually set on foot a prosecution against the author as in league with the Pretender; wanted to have him accused of high treason, and obstinately persisted in, and returned to the charge; and that it was only through the friendly zeal and interest of Harley, and his representations to the queen, that he was pardoned and released from Newgate, whither he had been committed on the judges’ warrant, for writing something in defence of his pamphlet, after its presentation by the Grand Jury, and his being compelled to give bail to appear for trial! ‘The force of _dulness_ could no farther go.’

Defoe had before this given violent offence to the Dissenters, by _dissenting_ from and ‘disobliging’ them on a number of technical and doubtful points—a difference of which they seemed more tenacious than of the greatest affronts or deadliest injuries. Among others, he had opposed the principles of _occasional conformity_; that is, the liberty practised by some Dissenters, of going to church during their appointment to any public office, as they were prohibited from attending their own places of worship in their official costume. Nothing could be clearer, than that, if it was a point of conscience with these persons not to conform to the service of the established church, their being chosen mayor, sheriff, or alderman, did not give them a dispensation to that purpose. But many of the demure and purse-proud citizens of London, (among whom Mr. William Benson was a leader and a shining light,) resented their not being supposed at liberty to appear at church in their gold chains and robes of office, though contrary to their usual principles of nonconformity;—as children think they have a right to visit fine places in their new clothes on holidays. Their rage against Defoe was at its height, when he had nothing to say against Harley’s Tory administration, for bringing in _The Occasional Conformity Bill_, to debar Dissenters of this puerile and contradictory privilege. It was to the kindness and generosity of Harley, on this as well as on former occasions, in affording our author pecuniary aid, of which he was in the utmost need, (being without means, friends, and in prison,) and in rescuing him from the grasp of his own party, that we owe his silence on political and public questions during the last years of Queen Anne; and a line of conduct that, in the present day, seems wavering and equivocal. His gratitude for private benefits hardly condemned him to withhold his opinions on public matters; but at that time, personal and private ties bore greater sway over general and public duties than is the case at present. We entirely acquit Defoe of dishonest or unworthy motives. He might easily have gone quite over to the other side, if he had been inclined to make a market of himself: but of this he never betrayed the remotest intention, and merely refused to join in the hue and cry against a man who had twice saved him from starving in a dungeon. Be this as it may, Defoe never recovered from the slur thus cast upon his political integrity, and was under a cloud, and discountenanced during the following reign; though the establishment of this very Protestant succession had been the object of the labours of his whole life, and was the wish that lay nearest his heart to his latest breath.

Defoe had, in the former reign, been at various times employed at her majesty’s desire, and in her service, particularly in accomplishing the Union with Scotland in 1707. He displayed great activity and zeal in accommodating the differences of all parties; and his _History_ of that event has been pronounced by good judges to be a masterpiece. But as to the numerous transactions in which he was concerned, and his various publications and controversies, we must refer the reader to Mr. Wilson, who has furnished ample details and instructive comments. For ourselves, we must ‘hold our hands and check our pride,’ or we should never have done. Of all Defoe’s multifarious effusions, the only one in which there is a want of candour and good faith, or in which he has wilfully blunted and deadened his _moral sense_, is his Defence, or (which is the same thing) his Apology for the Massacre of Glencoe. But King William was his idol, and he could no more see any faults in him than spots in the sun. Our old friend Daniel also tries us hard, when he rails at the poor servants, or ‘fine madams,’ as he calls them, who get a little better clothes and higher wages when they come up to London, than they had in the country; when he _runs a-muck_ at stage-plays, and the triumphs of the mimic scene;—confounding ‘Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, with Lucifer, Prince of Darkness.’ But these were the follies and prejudices of the time, aided by a little tincture of vulgarity, and the sourness of sectarian bigotry.

We pass on to his Novels, and are sorry that we must hasten over them. We owe them to the ill odour into which he had fallen as a politician. His fate with his party reminds one a little of the reception which the heroine of the _Heart of Mid-Lothian_ met with from her sister, because she would not tell a lie for her; yet both were faithful and true to their cause. Being laid aside by the Whigs, as a suspected person, and not choosing to go over to the other side, he retired to Stoke-Newington, where, as already mentioned, he had an attack of apoplexy, which had nearly proved fatal to him. Recovering, however, and his activity of mind not suffering him to be idle, he turned his thoughts into a new channel, and, as if to change the scene entirely, set about writing Romances. The first work that could come under this title was _The Family Instructor_;—a sort of controversial narrative, in which an argument is held through three volumes, and a feverish interest is worked up to the most tragic height, on ‘the abomination’ (as it was at that time thought by many people, and among others by Defoe) of letting young people go to the play. The implied horror of dramatic exhibitions, in connexion with the dramatic effect of the work itself, leaves a curious impression. Defoe’s polemical talents are brought to bear to very good purpose in this performance, which was in the form of Letters; and it is curious to mark the eagerness with which his pen, after having been taken up for so many years with dry debates and doctrinal points, flies for relief to the details and incidents of private life. His mind was equally tenacious of facts and arguments, and fastened on each, in its turn, with the same strong and unremitting grasp. _Robinson Crusoe_, published in 1719, was the first of his performances in the acknowledged shape of a romance; and from this time he brought out one or two every year to the end of his life. As it was the first, it was decidedly the best; it gave full scope to his genius; and the subject mastered his prevailing bias to religious controversy, and the depravity of social life, by confining him to the unsophisticated views of nature and the human heart. His other works of fiction have not been read, (in comparison)—and one reason is, that many of them, at least, are hardly fit to be read, whatever may be said to the contrary. We shall go a little into the theory of this.

We do not think a person brought up and trammelled all his life in the strictest notions of religion and morality, and looking at the world, and all that was ordinarily passing in it, as little better than a contamination, is, _a priori_, the properest person to write novels: it is going out of his way—it is ‘meddling with the unclean thing.’ Extremes meet, and all extremes are bad. According to our author’s overstrained Puritanical notions, there were but two choices, God or the Devil—Sinners and Saints—the Methodist meeting or the Brothel—the school of the press-yard of Newgate, or attendance on the refreshing ministry of some learned and pious dissenting Divine. As the smallest falling off from faith, or grace, or the most trifling peccadillo, was to be reprobated and punished with the utmost severity, no wonder that the worst turn was given to every thing; and that the imagination having once overstepped the formidable line, gave a loose to its habitual nervous dread, by indulging in the blackest and most frightful pictures of the corruptions incident to human nature. It was as well (in the cant phrase) ‘to be in for a sheep as a lamb,’ as it cost nothing more—the sin might at least be startling and uncommon; and hence we find, in this style of writing, nothing but an alternation of religious horrors and raptures, (though these are generally rare, as being a less tempting bait,) and the grossest scenes of vice and debauchery: we have either saintly, spotless purity, or all is rotten to the core. How else can we account for it, that all Defoe’s characters (with one or two exceptions for form’s sake) are of the worst and lowest description—the refuse of the prisons and the stews—thieves, prostitutes, vagabonds, and pirates—as if he wanted to make himself amends for the restraint under which he had laboured ‘all the fore-end of his time’ as a moral and religious character, by acting over every excess of grossness and profligacy by proxy! How else can we comprehend that he should really think there was a salutary moral lesson couched under the history of _Moll Flanders_; or that his romance of _Roxana, or the Fortunate Mistress_, who rolls in wealth and pleasure from one end of the book to the other, and is quit for a little death-bed repentance and a few lip-deep professions of the vanity of worldly joys, showed, in a striking point of view, the advantages of virtue, and the disadvantages of vice? It cannot be said, however, that these works have an _immoral_ tendency. The author has contrived to neutralise the question; and (as far as in him lay) made vice and virtue equally contemptible or revolting. In going through his pages, we are inclined to vary Mr. Burke’s well-known paradox, that ‘vice, by losing all its grossness, loses half its evil,’ and say that vice, by losing all its refinement, loses all its attraction. We have in them only the pleasure of sinning, and the dread of punishment here or hereafter;—gross sensuality, and whining repentance. The morality is that of the inmates of a house of correction; the piety, that of malefactors in the condemned hole. There is no sentiment, no atmosphere of imagination, no ‘purple light’ thrown round virtue or vice;—all is either the physical gratification on the one hand, or a selfish calculation of consequences on the other. This is the necessary effect of allowing nothing to the frailty of human nature;—of never strewing the flowers of fancy in the path of pleasure, but always looking that way with a sort of terror as to forbidden ground: nothing is left of the common and mixed enjoyments and pursuits of human life but the coarsest and criminal part; and we have either a sour, cynical, sordid sell-denial, or (in the despair of attaining this) a reckless and unqualified abandonment of all decency and character alike:—it is hard to say which is the most repulsive. Defoe runs equally into extremes in his male characters as in his heroines. _Captain Singleton_ is a hardened, brutal desperado, without one redeeming trait, or almost human feeling; and, in spite of what Mr. Lamb says of his lonely musings and agonies of a conscience-stricken repentance, we find nothing of this in the text: the captain is always merry and well if there is any mischief going on; and his only qualm is, after he has retired from his trade of plunder and murder on the high seas, and is afraid of being assassinated for his ill-gotten wealth, and does not know how to dispose of it. Defoe (whatever his intentions may be) is led, by the force of truth and circumstances, to give the Devil his due—he puts no gratuitous remorse into his adventurer’s mouth, nor spoils the _keeping_ by expressing one relenting pang, any more than his hero would have done in reality. This is, indeed, the excellence of Defoe’s representations, that they are perfect _fac-similes_ of the characters he chooses to pourtray; but then they are too often the worst specimens he can collect out of the dregs and sink of human nature. _Colonel Jack_ is another instance, with more pleasantry, and a common vein of humanity; but still the author is flung into the same walk of flagrant vice and immorality;—as if his mind was haunted by the entire opposition between grace and nature—and as if, out of the sphere of spiritual exercise and devout contemplation, the whole actual world was a necessary tissue of what was worthless and detestable.

We have, we hope, furnished a clue to this seeming contradiction between the character of the author and his works; and must proceed to a conclusion. Of these novels we may, nevertheless, add, for the satisfaction of the inquisitive reader, that _Moll Flanders_ is utterly vile and detestable: Mrs. Flanders was evidently born in sin. The best parts are the account of her childhood, which is pretty and affecting; the fluctuation of her feelings between remorse and hardened impenitence in Newgate; and the incident of her leading off the horse from the inn door, though she had no place to put it in after she had stolen it. This was carrying the love of thieving to an _ideal_ pitch, and making it perfectly disinterested and mechanical. _Roxana_ is better—soaring a higher flight, instead of grovelling always in the mire of poverty and distress; but she has neither refinement nor a heart; we are only dazzled with the outward ostentation of jewels, finery, and wealth. The scene where she dances in her Turkish dress before the king, and obtains the name of Roxana, is of the true romantic cast. The best parts of _Colonel Jack_ are the early scenes, where there is a spirit of mirth and good fellowship thrown over the homely features of low and vicious life;—as where the hero and his companion are sitting at the three-halfpenny ordinary, and are delighted, even more than with their savoury fare, to hear the waiter cry, ‘Coming, gentlemen, coming,’ when they call for a cup of small-beer; and we rejoice when we are told as a notable event, that ‘about this time the Colonel took upon him to wear a shirt.’ The _Memoirs of a Cavalier_ are an agreeable mixture of the style of history and fiction. These Memoirs, as is well known, imposed upon Lord Chatham as a true history. In his _History of Apparitions_, Defoe discovers a strong bias to a belief in the marvellous and preternatural; nor is this extraordinary, for, to say nothing of the general superstition of the times, his own impressions of whatever he chose to conceive are so vivid and literal, as almost to confound the distinction between reality and imagination. He could ‘call spirits from the vasty deep,’ and they ‘would come when he did call for them.’ We have not room for an enumeration of even half his works of fiction. We give the bust, and must refer to Mr. Wilson for the whole length. After _Robinson Crusoe_, his _History of the Plague_ is the finest of all his works. It has an epic grandeur, as well as heart-breaking familiarity, in its style and matter.

Notwithstanding the number and success of his publications, Defoe, we lament to add, had to struggle with pecuniary difficulties, heightened by domestic afflictions. To the last, when on the brink of death, he was on the verge of a jail; and the ingratitude and ill-behaviour of his son in embezzling some property which Defoe had made over for the benefit of his sisters and mother, completed his distress. He was supported in these painful circumstances by the assistance and advice of Mr. Baker, who had married his youngest daughter, Sophia. The subjoined letter gives a melancholy but very striking picture of the state of his feelings at this sad juncture:—