as Mrs. Haywood, less a
journalist than a romancer, rested her claim to public favor upon the
secure basis of the tender passions. In the books exploiting the deaf
and dumb prophet Duncan Campbell, whose fame, once illustrated by
notices in the "Tatler" and "Spectator,"[1] was becoming a little dimmed
by 1720, each writer chose the kind of material that the natural
propensity and previous experience of each had trained him or her to use
with the greatest success.

Accordingly the "History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Duncan
Campbell, a gentleman who, though deaf and dumb, writes down any
stranger's name at first sight, with their future contingencies of
fortune: Now living in Exeter Court, over against the Savoy in the
Strand," published by Curll on 30 April, 1720, and written largely by
Defoe, devoted only four chapters directly to the narrative of the
conjuror's life, while four chapters and the Appendix were given over to
disquisitions upon the method of teaching deaf and dumb persons to read
and write; upon the perception of demons, genii, or familiar spirits;
upon the second sight; upon magic in all its branches; and upon the laws
against false diviners and soothsayers. Beside showing the keenness of
his interest in the supernatural, the author deliberately avoided any
occasion for talking gossip or for indulging "persons of airy tempers"
with sentimental love-tales. "Instead of making them a bill of fare out
of patchwork romances and polluting scandal," reads the preface signed
by Duncan Campbell, "the good old gentleman who wrote the adventures of
my life has made it his business to treat them with a great variety of
entertaining passages which always terminate in morals that tend to the
edification of all readers, of whatsoever sex, age, or profession."
Those who came to consult the seer on affairs of the heart, therefore,
received only the scantiest mention from his biographer, and never were
the languishing and sighing of Mr. Campbell's devotees described with
any romantic glamor. On the contrary, Defoe portrayed in terse and
homely phrases the follies and affectations of the dumb man's fair
clients. The young blooming beauty who found little Duncan "wallowing in
the dust" and bribed him with a sugarplum to reveal the name of her
future husband; the "sempstress with an itching desire for a parson";
housekeepers in search of stolen goods; the "widow who bounced" from one
end of the room to the other and fi