sland can be appreciated by the simplest
sailor or schoolboy. The main thing is to bring out the situation
plainly and forcibly, to tell us of the difficulties of making pots and
pans, of catching goats and sowing corn, and of avoiding audacious
cannibals. This task De Foe performs with unequalled spirit and
vivacity. In his first discovery of a new art he shows the freshness so
often conspicuous in first novels. The scenery was just that which had
peculiar charms for his fancy; it was one of those half-true legends of
which he had heard strange stories from seafaring men, and possibly from
the acquaintances of his hero himself. He brings out the shrewd
vigorous character of the Englishman thrown upon his own resources with
evident enjoyment of his task. Indeed, De Foe tells us very emphatically
that in Robinson Crusoe he saw a kind of allegory of his own fate. He
had suffered from solitude of soul. Confinement in his prison is
represented in the book by confinement in an island; and even a
particular incident, here and there, such as the fright he receives one
night from something in his bed, 'was word for word a history of what
happened.' In other words, this novel too, like many of the best ever
written, has in it the autobiographical element which makes a man speak
from greater depths of feeling than in a purely imaginary story.

It would indeed be easy to show that the story, though in one sense
marvellously like truth, is singularly wanting as a psychological study.
Friday is no real savage, but a good English servant without plush. He
says 'muchee' and 'speakee,' but he becomes at once a civilised being,
and in his first conversation puzzles Crusoe terribly by that awkward
theological question, why God did not kill the devil--for
characteristically enough Crusoe's first lesson includes a little
instruction upon the enemy of mankind. He found, however, that it was
'not so easy to imprint right notions in Friday's mind about the devil,
as it was about the being of a God.' This is comparatively a trifle; but
Crusoe himself is all but impossible. Steele, indeed, gives an account
of Selkirk, from which he infers that 'this plain man's story is a
memorable example that he is happiest who confines his wants to natural
necessities;' but the facts do not warrant this pet doctrine of an
old-fashioned school. Selkirk's state of mind may be inferred from two
or three facts. He had almost forgotten to talk; he had learnt to ca