facts tell the story of themselves, without any demand for romantic
power to press them home to us; and the efforts to give an air of
authenticity to the story, which sometimes make us smile, and sometimes
rather bore us, in other novels are all to the purpose; for there is a
real point in putting such a story in the mouth of the sufferer, and in
giving us for the time an illusory belief in his reality. It is one of
the exceptional cases in which the poetical aspect of a position is
brought out best by the most prosaic accuracy of detail; and we imagine
that Robinson Crusoe's island, with all his small household torments,
will always be more impressive than the more gorgeously coloured island
of Enoch Arden. When we add that the whole book shows the freshness of a
writer employed on his first novel--though at the mature age of
fifty-eight; seeing in it an allegory of his own experience embodied in
the scenes which most interested his imagination, we see some reasons
why 'Robinson Crusoe' should hold a distinct rank by itself amongst his
works. As De Foe was a man of very powerful but very limited
imagination--able to see certain aspects of things with extraordinary
distinctness, but little able to rise above them--even his greatest book
shows his weakness, and scarcely satisfies a grown-up man with a taste
for high art. In revenge, it ought, according to Rousseau, to be for a
time the whole library of a boy, chiefly, it seems, to teach him that
the stock of an ironmonger is better than that of a jeweller. We may
agree in the conclusion without caring about the reason; and to have
pleased all the boys in Europe for near a hundred and fifty years is,
after all, a remarkable feat.

One remark must be added, which scarcely seems to have been sufficiently
noticed by Defoe's critics. He cannot be understood unless we remember
that he was primarily and essentially a journalist, and that even his
novels are part of his journalism. He was a pioneer in the art of
newspaper writing, and anticipated with singular acuteness many later
developments of his occupation. The nearest parallel to him is Cobbett,
who wrote still better English, though he could hardly have written a
'Robinson Crusoe.' Defoe, like Cobbett, was a sturdy middle-class
Englishman, and each was in his time the most effective advocate of the
political views of his class. De Foe represented the Whiggism, not of
the great 'junto' or aristocratic ring, but of the diss