his
picture of self-education, self-inquiry, self-happiness, is scarcely a
fiction, although it includes all the magic of romance; and is not a
mere narrative of truth, since it displays all the forcible genius of
one of the most original minds our literature can boast. The history of
the work is therefore interesting. It was treated in the author's time
as a mere idle romance, for the philosophy was not discovered in the
story; after his death it was considered to have been pillaged from the
papers of Alexander Selkirk, confided to the author, and the honour, as
well as the genius, of De Foe were alike questioned.

The entire history of this work of genius may now be traced, from the
first hints to the mature state, to which only the genius of De Foe
could have wrought it.

The adventures of Selkirk are well known: he was found on the desert
island of Juan Fernandez, where he had formerly been left, by Woodes
Rogers and Edward Cooke, who in 1712 published their voyages, and told
the extraordinary history of Crusoe's prototype, with all those curious
and minute particulars which Selkirk had freely communicated to them.
This narrative of itself is extremely interesting, and has been given
entire by Captain Burney; it may also be found in the Biographia
Britannica.

In this artless narrative we may discover more than the embryo of
Robinson Crusoe.--The first appearance of Selkirk, "a man clothed in
goats' skins, who looked more wild than the first owners of them." The
two huts he had built, the one to dress his victuals, the other to sleep
in: his contrivance to get fire, by rubbing two pieces of pimento wood
together; his distress for the want of bread and salt, till he came to
relish his meat without either; his wearing out his shoes, till he grew
so accustomed to be without them, that he could not for a long time
afterwards, on his return home, use them without inconvenience; his
bedstead of his own contriving, and his bed of goat-skins; when his
gunpowder failed, his teaching himself by continual exercise to run as
swiftly as the goats; his falling from a precipice in catching hold of a
goat, stunned and bruised, till coming to his senses he found the goat
dead under him; his taming kids to divert himself by dancing with them
and his cats; his converting a nail into a needle; his sewing his
goatskins with little thongs of the same; and when his knife was worn to
the back, contriving to make blades out of some iron