n. To confirm his story, he produces a bit of paper on which is
written, in plain English words: 'We came from Greenland and from the
North Pole.' Here are claimants for the discovery of a North-west
Passage, of whom we would gladly hear more. Unluckily, when Captain
Singleton comes to the place where his Quaker had met the priest, the
ship in which he was sailing had departed; and this put an end to an
inquiry, and perhaps 'may have disappointed mankind of one of the most
noble discoveries that ever was made or will again be made, in the
world, for the good of mankind in general; but so much for that.'

In these two fragments, which illustrate a very common device of De
Foe's, we come across two elements of positive power over our
imaginations. Even De Foe's imagination recognised and delighted in a
certain margin of mystery to this harsh world of facts and figures. He
is generally too anxious to set everything before us in broad daylight;
there is too little of the thoughts and emotions which inhabit the
twilight of the mind; of those dim half-seen forms which exercise the
strongest influence upon the imagination, and are the most tempting
subjects for the poet's art. De Foe, in truth, was little enough of a
poet. Sometimes by mere force of terse idiomatic language he rises into
real poetry, as it was understood in the days when Pope and Dryden were
our lawgivers. It is often really vigorous. The well-known verses--

Wherever God erects a house of prayer,
The devil always builds a chapel there--

which begin the 'True-born Englishman,' or the really fine lines which
occur in the 'Hymn to the Pillory,' that 'hieroglyphic state machine,
contrived to punish fancy in,' and ending--

Tell them that placed him here,
They're scandals to the times,
Are at a loss to find his guilt,
_And can't commit his crimes_--

may stand for specimens of his best manner. More frequently he
degenerates into the merest doggerel, _e.g._--

No man was ever yet so void of sense,
As to debate the right of self-defence,
A principle so grafted in the mind,
With nature born, and does like nature bind;
Twisted with reason, and with nature too,
As neither one nor t'other can undo--

which is scarcely a happy specimen of the difficult art of reasoning in
verse. His verse is at best vigorous epigrammatic writing, such as would
now be converted into leading articles, twisted with more or less
vio