headed 'Superstition in the nineteenth century.' In his
novels De Foe's instinct for probability generally enables him to employ
the marvellous moderately, and, therefore, effectively; he is specially
given to dreams; they are generally verified just enough to leave us the
choice of credulity or scepticism, and are in excellent keeping with the
supposed narrator. Roxana tells us how one morning she suddenly sees her
lover's face as though it were a death's-head, and his clothes covered
with blood. In the evening the lover is murdered. One of Moll Flanders'
husbands hears her call him at a distance of many miles--a superstition,
by the way, in which Boswell, if not Johnson, fully believed. De Foe
shows his usual skill in sometimes making the visions or omens fail of a
too close fulfilment, as in the excellent dream where Robinson Crusoe
hears Friday's father tell him of the sailors' attempt to murder the
Spaniards: no part of the dream, as he says, is specifically true,
though it has a general truth; and hence we may, at our choice, suppose
it to have been supernatural, or to be merely a natural result of
Crusoe's anxiety. This region of the marvellous, however, only affects
De Foe's novels in a subordinate degree. The Owke Mouraski suggests
another field in which a lover of the mysterious could then find room
for his imagination. The world still presented a boundless wilderness
of untravelled land. Mapped and explored territory was still a bright
spot surrounded by chaotic darkness, instead of the two being in the
reverse proportions. Geographers might fill up huge tracts by writing
'here is much gold,' or putting 'elephants instead of towns.' De Foe's
gossiping acquaintance, when they were tired of ghosts, could tell of
strange adventures in wild seas, where merchantmen followed a narrow
track, exposed to the assaults of pirates; or of long journeys over
endless steppes, in the days when travelling was travelling indeed; when
distances were reckoned by months, and men might expect to meet
undiscovered tribes and monsters unimagined by natural historians.
Doubtless he had listened greedily to the stories of seafaring men and
merchants from the Gold Coast or the East. 'Captain Singleton,' to omit
'Robinson Crusoe' for the present, shows the form into which these
stories moulded themselves in his mind. Singleton, besides his other
exploits, anticipated Livingstone in crossing Africa from sea to sea. De
Foe's biographers rat