lence into rhyme. And yet there is a poetical side to his mind, or at
least a susceptibility to poetical impressions of a certain order. And
as a novelist is on the border-line between poetry and prose, and novels
should be as it were prose saturated with poetry, we may expect to come
in this direction upon the secret of De Foe's power. Although De Foe for
the most part deals with good tangible subjects, which he can weigh and
measure and reduce to moidores and pistoles, the mysterious has a very
strong though peculiar attraction for him. It is indeed that vulgar kind
of mystery which implies nothing of reverential awe. He was urged by a
restless curiosity to get away from this commonplace world, and reduce
the unknown regions beyond to scale and measure. The centre of Africa,
the wilds of Siberia, and even more distinctly the world of spirits, had
wonderful charms for him. Nothing would have given him greater pleasure
than to determine the exact number of the fallen angels and the date of
their calamity. In the 'History of the Devil' he touches, with a
singular kind of humorous gravity, upon several of these questions, and
seems to apologise for his limited information. 'Several things,' he
says, 'have been suggested to set us a-calculating the number of this
frightful throng of devils who, with Satan the master-devil, was thus
cast out of heaven.' He declines the task, though he quotes with a
certain pleasure the result obtained by a grave calculator, who found
that in the first line of Satan's army there were a thousand times a
hundred thousand million devils, and more in the other two. He gives a
kind of arithmetical measure of the decline of the devil's power by
pointing out that 'he who was once equal to the angel who killed eighty
thousand men in one night, is not able now, without a new commission, to
take away the life of one Job.' He is filled with curiosity as to the
proceedings of the first parliament (p--------t as he delicately puts
it) of devils; he regrets that as he was not personally present in that
'black divan'--at least, not that he can remember, for who can account
for his pre-existent state?--he cannot say what happened; but he adds,
'If I had as much personal acquaintance with the devil as would admit
it, and could depend upon the truth of what answer he would give me, the
first question would be, what measures they (the devils) resolved on at
their first assembly?' and the second how they employed