given you a great contempt for men, and taught you how to live with
them. You know that all their assurances go for nothing. In exchange you
give them politeness and consideration, and all those who do not care
about being loved are content with you.

I do not know whether you have much feeling. If you have, you fight it
as a weakness. You permit yourself only that which seems virtuous. You
are a philosopher; you have no vanity, although you have a great deal of
self-love. But your self-love does not blind you; it rather makes you
exaggerate your faults than conceal them. You never extol yourself
except when you are forced to do so by comparing yourself with other
men. You possess discernment, very delicate tact, very correct taste;
your tone is excellent.

You would have been the best possible companion in past centuries; you
are in this, and you would be in those to come. Englishman as you are,
your manners belong to all countries.

You have an unpardonable weakness to which you sacrifice your feelings
and submit your conduct--the fear of ridicule. It makes you dependent
upon the opinion of fools; and your friends are not safe from the
impressions against them which fools choose to give you.

Your judgment is easily confused. You are aware of this weakness, which
you control by the firmness with which you pursue your resolutions. Your
opposition to any deviation is sometimes pushed too far, and exercised
in matters not worth the trouble.

Your instincts are noble and generous. You do good for the pleasure of
doing it, without ostentation, without claiming gratitude; in short,
your spirit is beautiful and high.

DANIEL DEFOE

(1660?-1731)

BY CHARLES FREDERICK JOHNSON

[Illustration: DANIEL DEFOE.]

Daniel Defoe, one of the most vigorous and voluminous writers of the
last decade of the seventeenth and the first quarter of the eighteenth
centuries, was born in St. Giles parish, Cripplegate, in 1660 or 1661,
and died near London in 1731. His father was a butcher named Foe, and
the evolution of the son's name through the various forms of D. Foe, De
Foe, Defoe, to Daniel Defoe, the present accepted form, did not begin
much before he reached the age of forty. He was educated at the
"dissenting school" of a Mr. Martin in Newington Green, and was intended
for the Presbyterian ministry. Although the training at this school was
not inferior to that to be obtained at the universities,--and indeed
superior