stand to it; though accepted, and offered to be determined by their own arbitrator; if I should run on into all these particulars, the story would be too black to read." I can quote no more. It is the old tale of the light, dressy, devil-may-care spendthrift, which has been told a thousand upon a thousand times; always persecuted by relations, friends, foes, and strangers, always wrong, always cheated, and never to blame. Another sacrifice to the black-coated, well-brushed, British godRespectability. Daniel De Foe must be respectable-yes! keep his coach upon his pantile trade of Tilbury Fort, and walk Bristol streets on Sunday, with wig, sword, ruffles, and frills, if hid from bailiffs and creditors for the remaining six days of the week, in a garret or a cellar! The lawyer had committed forgery; the age was mad, and he had been fourteen years in retreat, in jeopardy, in broils, and most of the time in banishment from his family; all his profits from his books had been swallowed up, though that has been very considerable, in making gradual payments to creditors; and in defending himself against those who would have it not only faster than their fellowcreditors, but even faster than it could be got. From this it would appear, that he had been in pecuniary difficulties, and separated from his family, for the most part, as an improvident husband and spendthrift father, from 1692; or ten years before the death of his great benefactor and friend, William III. of glorious memory. Well, William came in 1688, and died in 1702; and De Foe in 1706, in his Review for August 23, declares that he had been in retreat fourteen years, with jeopardy, broils, and most of the time in banishment from his family; and after the above, he goes on to say, "that they have since seen him stripped naked by the government, and the foundations torn up, on which he had built the prospect of paying debts, and raising his family; and yet now, when by common reasoning they ought to believe, the man has not bread for his children, have redoubled their attacks, with declarations, executions, escape warrants, and God knows how many engines of destruction; as if a gaol and death would pay their debts; as if money was to be found in the blood of the debtor, and they were to open his veins to find it. That bind the ready hands of Industry, They strip me naked first, then bid me pay. "But if this is not yet all, and though I confess, I did not expect it from anybody; yet as some whisperings have been spread of a further plot, even against the life of this unhappy debtor, and that among his friends too; he cannot but take notice of it here, as what he thinks the only proper reason, and is indeed one of the chief reasons of this publication, and which he hopes the world will allow to be a good reason; and this is a scandalous and vile suggestion, that he made concealments to defraud his creditors; or, in English, has not made a fair surrender of his effects. Now as, if this be true, he must be the greatest fool, as well as knave, knowing how many bloody enemies, as well as base and hypocritical friends, he is compassed with; so, if this be not true, the suggestion is a most vile and barbarous scandal. "The debtor can be guilty but two ways: either by innocent mistake, or by wilful deceit. For the first, omissions are certainly possible. Gentlemen, the author of this is no more infallible than other men; he may, and 'tis much if he have not, in the life of constant hurries he has lived; he may have forgotten, mistaken, wrong stated, wrong cast up, or otherwise erred in some part or branch of his account; and if this is your charge, gentlemen-if you are Christians, if men of like frailties, and whose case one time or other want the same like charity; if you have anything left in you that is moral or human; if any compassion for a man in danger, and a family with seven children that must perish in his disaster, help him, gentlemen, help in time, inform him of it, give the needful hint; and in common charity, show him this gulph, this pit of destruction, before it be too late to retrieve it. "Pray, gentlemen, come in with your charge at the meeting, and let it appear." It would appear from the above, that for fourteen years previous to 1706, De Foe had been running up and down the country an outcast, for the most part, and escaped, as is always the case with such outcasts, from the regular domestic comforts of house and home; an alien, stranger, intruder on his own hearthstone-a political secret-service official of the government, and party writer for bread; is it so? I should be sorry to detract from one of the greatest philosophers England ever knew, as well as one of her true-born sons; but yet, I fear, I must say-an improvident man, whose necessities compelled him to write for party bread. His father, James Foe, butcher, died in lodgings in 1705, leaving no will, and probably no effects; and Daniel, the subject of this writing, does not account for several years of his own life—I think six years -from his leaving Mr. Morton's academy, and again appearing as hose-factor in Freeman's Court, Cornhill. Some of De Foe's biographers have always represented him as a large Spanish, or large Dutch, or large German, or East Indian merchant. I believe nothing of the kind. He was a great philosopher, writer, and statesman (SCOTLAND, and its UNION with ENGLAND, to wit), who never had any means of subsistence; for he was always improvident; he lived a life of usefulness to his country-but lived, as he died, without a shilling. When De Foe commences the date of his embarrassments I know not. I should suppose he would leave out of the reckoning the period when he carried on the pantile trade at Tilbury Fort, and kept his coach out of the profits. It is certain that Ned Ward, in his Dissenting Hypocrite, places him in Newgate as early as 1689 (the year after William III. came as the deliverer of this country), and in Newgate for debt; for at the collection (as we have seen) in Dr. Daniel Burgess's chapel, it was given out, that Daniel wanted bread, and the collection for that bread was made accordingly. CHAPTER VI. IN the Review for July 18, 1706, De Foe announces a work for publication on the following Saturday; and a caution is given against the octavo edition, which was pirated and brought out at the same time; this work having been announced for publication so early as the year 1704, and subscriptions received on account of the work, and the work not appearing as announced, and partly subscribed for, great clamour was excited among the subscribers against the work, and against the author; and this was the folio poem against the divine right of kings, entitled Jure Divino. This work is voluminous and patriotic; but poor, perhaps, in the art of poetry, as may be accounted for by the fact of his being a prisoner in Newgate for writing the Shortest Way with the Dissenters when it was composed; and when his time must have been occupied with other subjects. it was. We might readily believe that the jovial brutality of the felons' yard at Newgate was not exactly congenial to poetic inspiration on the rights of peoples, or the usurpations of monarchs. No! but so Jure Divino was written, for the most part, in Newgate, when De Foe was a prisoner there in 1703 and 1704: and at a time when he was greatly occupied with the publication of his Review, and other works; for at this time he was truly industrious, as his various works fully testify; and on his release he was taken into diplomatic service by Harley, as a make-up, I suppose, for his forced neglect of his pamphleteer while confined in Newgate. He was liberated in the autumn of 1704; and in the following summer he was sent on some secret mission, fortified by govermental passports, into dangerous if not foreign parts; where he travelled under the assumed name of Mr. Christopher Hurt. On this dangerous secret service he was absent four months, somewhere—perhaps in Dorsetshire and Devonshire, taking an active part in the election, May we stop to inquire here, what could this mean? Harley sending De Foe among the freeholders of Dorsetshire and Devonshire, to preach up liberalism and self-reliance. Harley had been three times elected Speaker of the House of Commons, and knew better than any living man, the construction and dependencies of that House. Harley dinnered himself into the Speaker's chair, and he dinnered himself likewise into the office of secretary of state. He knew the House well, and the expenses attending the keeping up a working majority from the members of the rotten boroughs; and it might be convenient for a man as secretary of state to wish a House rather differently constituted, for his own safety or comfort, to that which he might require when an aspiring, turbulent, uneasy Speaker of the House of the Commons, where all the conceivable corruption might be profitable to him as a rising power; and very depressing to the minister of the time, who had these men to pay or buy up. Be the cause what it may, De Foe was engaged by Harley, when secretary of state, to go into Dorsetshire and Devonshire, to try to stem that torrent of High-Church jure-divino principles, which French gold had so fully cherished in the House of Commons during the whole reign of William III.; even to the buying up of 160 or more members by Cardinal Mazarin, the French minister, for the use and benefit of Louis XIV., his lord and master. Harley, when Speaker, set De Foe upon spreading these HighChurch doctrines; and when De Foe had turned out Lord Nottingham, and placed Harley in his seat, then Harley, as minister, set De Foe upon undoing the very work he had previously set him upon. It was in the summer of 1705, that the elections took place throughout England; and this was the time when De Foe was "upon a journey about his lawful occasions," in Devonshire and the west of England, on an electioneering tour, and under the sanction or protection of government passports, to keep him from the prying annoyances of country justices. All these important missions prevented De Foe bringing out his important work, Jure Divino, so punctually as he had intended; which caused considerable dissatis |