born Englishman. John Tutchin had accused William of being an alien Dutchman in a doggerel poem called The Foreigners. Defoe was "filled with a kind of rage," and retorted in The True-born Englishman, a satire, dated January, 1701, and opening with the famous lines:

Wherever God erects a house of prayer,

The devil always builds a chapel there.

In a preface, which is a model of clear and forcible writing, Defoe disclaims metrical correctness and explains his object, which is to convince his countrymen of the expediency of living up to their reputation of being goodnatured, and to point out the absurdity of the English, who were a nation of mongrels compounded of the offscourings of Europe in all ages, posing as a pure and ancient race and despising foreigners as such. "What they are to-day, we were yesterday, and to-morrow they will be like us." Defoe made a thousand pounds by this artful lampoon on his fellow-countrymen, and was astonished by its success, which had had no parallel since the appearance of Hudibras.

The satire naturally brought Defoe high into favour with William, and William's death in March, 1702, was a serious blow to Defoe. The friends of Queen Anne were among the Tories and high-fliers, and she herself was a strong Churchwoman. A favourite measure of the High Church party at this time was a bill to suppress the practice by which dissenters conformed and took the Anglican communion just for the purpose of qualifying for a place or an appointment, and then relapsed promptly into dissent. Defoe himself disapproved of this practice as savouring of equivocation, though it was connived at by the dissenting ministers. He hated much more, however, the spirit of intolerance by which the High Church policy

was animated, and in December, 1702, he published his pamphlet called The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, which, as a piece of naked irony, approaches almost to the level of Swift. Writing ironically in the guise of an extreme Churchman, he shows with indignation how the Church has been steadily humiliated for fourteen years. Fines were useless; the proper remedy was a law that whoever was found at a conventicle should be banished or sent to the galleys and the preacher promptly hanged. The stupidity of faction is such that both the parties entirely misinterpreted Defoe's intention. Both sides were furious when they discovered that they had been fooled by a satirist and a trimmer. A reward was offered for the apprehension of Defoe, who finally surrendered, was fined, sentenced to imprisonment during the Queen's pleasure, and ordered to stand three times in the pillory. His standing in the pillory proved a triumph, for the people formed a guard, covered the pillory with flowers, and drank his health. But he had to go back to Newgate, and his business was ruined.

As he had talked with soldiers and seamen in his boyhood, so now in prison he talked with murderers, thieves, and harlots, and gathered the material for his criminal romances. While still in Newgate, on February 19th, 1704, he began the famous periodical known as The Review, a paper which lasted till 1713, and was the immediate forerunner of the Tatler, Spectator, and other periodical issues. Apart from the dynasty which he thus founded, The Review is a marvel of single-handed journalism. In strength, agility, and fertility as a journalist, Defoe has probably had few rivals. Leigh Hunt might perhaps be named as one. A little later in this same year (1704) Harley, having scented out Defoe as a pamphleteer whom a party might well be proud of, released him from his bondage, sent a large supply of money for the relief of

his wife and children, and bade him prepare for secret service. One of his chief employments during the years that followed was a mission to the north with the object of removing national prejudices against the Union of England and Scotland.

Defoe's political preoccupations were already on the wane by 1719, in which year he discovered a new and untried source of income. He was already an adept in what we might call the faits divers department of journalism, and with amazing fertility and seriousness he wrote, as it were upon oath, on every topic likely to attract public curiosity. His power had already been shown in comparative trifles such as The History of the Great Storm, Mrs. Veal's Ghost, and a queer imaginary history of an earthquake in St. Vincent. In April, 1719, he published The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner, founded upon the actual experience of one Alexander Selkirk, a Scots sailorman who had lived alone on the island of Juan Fernandez from 1704 to 1709, when he was released by Captain Woodes Rogers. Selkirk's history was related by Rogers in his Cruising Voyage Round the World, 1712, by Edward Cooke in his Voyage to the South Sea Trade, and more briefly and popularly from Selkirk's own lips by Steele in The Englishman for December, 1713. Defoe must have been familiar with this last account (which he supplemented from some well-fingered books in his library -the voyages of Hakluyt, Purchas, Knox, Vilault, Le Duc, Pitman) when he sat down quietly at Stoke Newington to write his "strange surprising" masterpiece, a world's favourite from that day to this, and in its own class, that of prose fiction, second in point of time to Don Quixote. The name of Crusoe he took from an old schoolmate the name is still familiar at Lynn. Its suc