ly on all toes that got in their way; blundering enormously and
preposterously, and yet always coming out steadily planted on their
feet; eating roast beef and plum-pudding; drinking rum in the tropics;
singing 'God Save the King' and intoning Watts's hymns under the nose of
ancient dynasties and prehistoric priesthoods; managing always to get
their own way, to force a reluctant world to take note of them as a
great if rather disagreeable fact, and making it probable that, in long
ages to come, the English of 'Robinson Crusoe' will be the native
language of inhabitants of every region under the sun.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Defoe may have had some materials for this story; but there seems to
be little doubt that it is substantially his own.

_RICHARDSON'S NOVELS_

The literary artifice, so often patronised by Lord Macaulay of
describing a character by a series of paradoxes, is of course, in one
sense, a mere artifice. It is easy enough to make a dark grey black and
a light grey white, and to bring the two into unnatural proximity. But
it rests also upon the principle which is more of a platitude than a
paradox, that our chief faults often lie close to our chief merits. The
greatest man is perhaps one who is so equably developed that he has the
strongest faculties in the most perfect equilibrium, and is apt to be
somewhat uninteresting to the rest of mankind. The man of lower eminence
has some one or more faculties developed out of all proportion to the
rest, with the natural result of occasionally overbalancing him.
Extraordinary memories with weak logical faculties, wonderful
imaginative sensibility with a complete absence of self-control, and
other defective conformations of mind, supply the raw materials for a
luminary of the second order, and imply a predisposition to certain
faults, which are natural complements to the conspicuous merits.

Such reflections naturally occur in speaking of one of our greatest
literary reputations, whose popularity is almost in an inverse ratio to
his celebrity. Every one knows the names of Sir Charles Grandison and
Clarissa Harlowe. They are amongst the established types which serve to
point a paragraph; but the volumes in which they are described remain
for the most part in undisturbed repose, sleeping peacefully amongst
Charles Lamb's _biblia a-biblia_, books which are no books, or, as he
explains, those books 'which no gentleman's library should be without.'
They never enjoy t