education than anything which Aristotle or the moderns had ever written.
And this suggests the most significant thing about Defoe's masterpiece,
namely, that the hero represents the whole of human society, doing with his
own hands all the things which, by the division of labor and the demands of
modern civilization, are now done by many different workers. He is
therefore the type of the whole civilized race of men.

In the remaining works of Defoe, more than two hundred in number, there is
an astonishing variety; but all are marked by the same simple, narrative
style, and the same intense realism. The best known of these are the
_Journal of the Plague Year_, in which the horrors of a frightful plague
are minutely recorded; the _Memoirs of a Cavalier_, so realistic that
Chatham quoted it as history in Parliament; and several picaresque novels,
like _Captain Singleton, Colonel Jack, Moll Flanders_, and _Roxana_. The
last work is by some critics given a very high place in realistic fiction,
but like the other three, and like Defoe's minor narratives of Jack
Sheppard and Cartouche, it is a disagreeable study of vice, ending with a
forced and unnatural repentance.

SAMUEL RICHARDSON (1689-1761)

To Richardson belongs the credit of writing the first modern novel. He was
the son of a London joiner, who, for economy's sake, resided in some
unknown town in Derbyshire, where Samuel was born in 1689. The boy received
very little education, but he had a natural talent for writing letters, and
even as a boy we find him frequently employed by working girls to write
their love letters for them. This early experience, together with his
fondness for the society of "his dearest ladies" rather than of men, gave
him that intimate knowledge of the hearts of sentimental and uneducated
women which is manifest in all his work. Moreover, he was a keen observer
of manners, and his surprisingly accurate descriptions often compel us to
listen, even when he is most tedious. At seventeen years of age he went to
London and learned the printer's trade, which he followed to the end of his
life. When fifty years of age he had a small reputation as a writer of
elegant epistles, and this reputation led certain publishers to approach
him with a proposal that he write a series of _Familiar Letters_, which
could be used as models by people unused to writing. Richardson gladly
accepted the proposal, and had the happy inspiration to make these letters
tell