house at Stoke Newington (only pulled down about ten years ago), which had stables and grounds of considerable size. From the negotiations for the marriage of his daughter Sophia it appears that he had landed property in more than one place, and he had obtained on lease in 1722 a considerable estate from the corporation of Colchester. It was formerly thought that he soon got rid of this lease, but from documents in Mr Lee s possession it seems that he only effected a mortgage upon it (afterwards paid off), and that it was settled on his unmarried daughter at his death. Other property was similarly allotted to his widow and remaining children, though some difficulty seems to have arisen from the misconduct of his son, to whom, for sme purpose, the property was assigned during his father s life time, and who refused to pay what was due. There is a good deal of mystery about the end of Defoe s life ; it used to be said thathe died insolvent, and thathe had been in jail shortly before his death. As a matter of fact, after great suffering from gout and stone, he died of a lethargy in Ropemaker s Alley, Moorfields, on Monday the 6th of April 1731, and was buried in the well-known ground of Bunhill Fields. He left no will, all his property having been previously assigned, and letters of administration were taken out by a creditor. How his affairs fell into this condition, why he did not die in his own house, and why in the previous summer he had been in hiding, as we know he was from a letter still extant, are points apparently not to be cleared up.
Family. Defoe was twice married, and his second wife Susannah outlived him a few months. He had seven children, one of whom, Martha, died in 1707 the others survived him. The eldest, Daniel, emigrated to Carolina. The second, Bernard or Benjamin Norton, has, like his father, a scandalous niche in the Dundad. Three of the daughters, Maria, Henrietta, and Sophia, married well the husband of the last-named being a Mr Henry Baker, of some repute iu natural science, In April 1877 public attention was called to the existence, in some distress, of three maiden ladies, directly descended from Defoe, and bearing his name ; and a crown pension of 75 a year was bestowed on each of them. There are several portraits of Defoe, the principal one being engraved by Vandergucht.
Repute. We have said that in his life-time Defoe, as not belonging to either of the great parties at a time of the bitterest party strife, was subjected to obloquy on both sides. The great Whig writers leave him unnoticed. Swift and Gay speak slightingly of him, the former, it is true, at a time when he was only known as a party pamphleteer. Pope, with less excuse, put him in the Dunciad towards the end of his life, but he confessed to Spence in private that Defoe had written many things and none bad. At a later period he was unjustly described as "a scurrilous party writer," which he certainly was not ; but, on the other hand, Johnson spoke of his writing " so variously and so well," and put Robinson Crusoe among the only three books that readers wish longer. From Scott downwards the tendency to judge literary work on its own merits has to a great extent restored Defoe to his proper place, or, to speak more correctly, has set him there for the first time. Lord Macaulay s description of Roxana, Moll Flanders, and Colonel Jack as " utterly nauseous and wretched " must be set aside as a freak of criticism.
Character- T ^ e grounds upon which the last-mentioned writer bases istics. his depreciation of others of Defoe s minor works are curious. " He had undoubtedly a knack of making fiction look like truth, but is such a knack much to be desired ] Is it not of the same sort as the knack of a painter who takes in the birds with his fruit 1" And De Quincey regards the literary skill of writers of this class as comparatively inferior because of the close resemblance of their writings to the current speech arid manner of their day. But nothing is really a greater triumph of art than this similarity, and Macaulay has certainly made a mistake in confounding the requirements of painting and of writing. Scott justly observed that Defoe s style " is the last which should be attempted by a writer of inferior genius ; for though it be possible to disguise mediocrity by fine writing, it appears in all its naked inanity when it assumes the garb of simplicity." The methods by which Defoe attains his result are not difficult to disengage. They are the present ment of all his ideas and scenes in the plainest and most direct language, the frequent employment of colloquial forms of speech, the constant insertion of little material details and illustrations, often of a more or less digressive form, and, in his historico-fictitious works, as well as in his novels, the most rigid attention to vivacity and consistency of character. Plot he disregards, and he is fond of throw ing his dialogues into regular dramatic form, with bye-play prescribed and stage directions interspersed. A particular trkk of his is also to divide his arguments after the manner of the preachers of his day into heads and subheads, with actual numerical signs affixed to them. These mannerisms undoubtedly help and emphasize the extraordinary faith fulness to nature of his fictions, but it would be a great mistake to suppose that they fully explain their charm. Defoe possessed genius, and his secret is at the last as impalpable as the secret of genius always is. The character of Defoe, both mental and moral, is very clearly indicated in his works. He, the satirist of the true- born Englishman, was himself a model, with some notable variations and improvements, of the Englishman of his period. He saw a great many things, and what he did see he saw clearly. But there were also a great many things which he did not see, and there was often no logical con nection whatever between his vision and his blindness. The most curious example of this inconsistency, or rather of this indifference to general principle, occurs in his Essay on Projects. He there speaks very briefly and slightingly of life-insurance, probably because it was then regarded as impious by religionists of his complexion. But on either side of this refusal are to be .found elaborate projects of friendly societies and widows funds, which practically cover, in a clumsy and roundabout manner, the whole ground of life-insurance. In morals it is evident that he was, accord ing to his lights, a strictly honest and honourable man. But sentiment of any high-flying description (to use the cant word of his time) was quite incomprehensible to him, or rather never presented itself as a thing to be compre hended. He tells us with honest and simple pride that when his patron Harley fellout, and Godolphin came in, he for three years held no communication with the former, and seems quite incapable of comprehending the delicacy which would have obliged him to follow Haiiey s fallen fortunes. His very anomalous position in regard to Mist is also indicative of a rather blunt moral perception. One of the most affecting things in his novels is the heroic con stancy and fidelity of the maid Amy to her exemplary mistress Boxana. But Amy, scarcely by her own fault, is drawn into certain breaches of certain definite moral laws which Defoe did understand, and she is therefore con demned, with hardly a word of pity, to a miserable end. Nothing heroic or romantic was within Defoe s view ; he could not understand passionate love, ideal loyalty, aesthetic admiration, or anything of the kind ; and it is probable that many of the little sordid touches which delight us by their apparent satire were, as designed, not satire at all, but merely a faithful representation of the feelings and ideas .of the classes of which he himself was a unit. VVe have noticed Charles Lamb s difficulty as to The Comjdcte 2 J radvsman, and we think that the explanation we have preferred will extend to a great deal more of his work.
