unce
my words distinctly. I wish he lived in England, I should not only have
a great deal of entertainment from him, but improvement.'--_Life and
Correspondence of Mrs Delany_, vol. i., p. 407.

[46] _Life of Swift_, p. 299.

[47] _Jonathan Swift, a Biographical and Critical Study_, by J. Churton
Collins, p. 267.

[48] See _The Life and Works of Dr. Arbuthnot_, by George A. Aitken.
Oxford, Clarendon Press.

CHAPTER VI.

DANIEL DEFOE--JOHN DENNIS--COLLEY CIBBER--LADY MARY WORTLEY
MONTAGU--EARL OF CHESTERFIELD--LORD LYTTELTON--JOSEPH SPENCE.

[Sidenote: Daniel Defoe (1661-1731).]

The most voluminous writer of his century is popularly remembered as the
author of one book, published in old age. Everybody has read _Robinson
Crusoe_, and knows the name of its author; but few readers outside the
narrow circle of literary students are aware of Defoe's exhaustless
labours as a politician, social reformer, projector, pamphleteer, and
novelist.

It would be well for the author's reputation if we knew less about him
than we do. There was a time when he was regarded as a noble sufferer in
the cause of civil and religious liberty. His faults were credited to
his age while his virtues were supposed to place him on an eminence far
above the time-servers who despised him. He has been praised as a man
courageously living for great aims, who was maligned by the malice of
party, and to whose memory scant justice has been done. 'No one,' says
Henry Kingsley, 'could come up to the standard of his absolute
precision,' and his 'inexorable honesty alienated everyone.' These words
were written in 1868. Four years previously, however, the discovery of
six letters in the State Paper Office, in Defoe's own hand, had entirely
destroyed his character for inexorable honesty, and the researches of
his latest and most exhaustive biographer,[49] who regards his hero's
vices as virtues, do but serve to give greater prominence to the
baseness of his conduct. Defoe, by his own confession, was for many
years in the pay of the Government for secret services, taking shares in
Tory papers and supervising them as editor, in order to defeat the aims
of the party to which he professed to be allied, and of the proprietors
with whom he was in partnership. Thus in 1718, he writes as a plea that
his labours should be remembered: 'I am, Sir, for this service, posted
among Papists, Jacobites, and enraged High Tories--a generation who I
profess my