pe ("a Person tho' Inferior to
Mr. _Dryden_, yet speaking Impartially has few Superiors in this Age")
also is persecuted by envy; and he has generous praise for that poet's
translation of Homer. One may note that Defoe avoids the shortcomings
of the critics whom he condemns for judging according to party. He
distributes his praise indiscriminately between Whig and Tory writers.
In short, his essay hardly does more than confirm the critical
commonplaces of the time and attest to the catholicity of the author's
taste.

Of particular interest for students of Defoe is the paragraph [p. 2l]
in which Defoe defends the hack-writers who must write for
subsistence. One should not expect their writings, which are
necessarily numerous, to be as correct and finished as they might be.
After comparing their pens to prostitutes because of their venality,
he claims, in a half-ironic tone, for both authors and booksellers the
liberty of writing and printing for either or both sides without
ignominy. After all, they must write and print to live. Such practice
is certainly, he observes, no more unjust or disreputable than other
ways of gaining wealth such as one finds in Exchange-Alley.

This paragraph gains point when one remembers that Defoe had served
both Whig and Tory governments. In 1718, as letters written to Lord
Stanhope in that very year testify, he was engaged in the perhaps
dubious business of masquerading as a Tory, while actually in the
service of the Whig ministry, to take the "sting" out of the more
violent Tory periodicals; and he was much concerned with the danger of
his ambiguous position. In December of 1717 he had been identified as
a writer for _Mist's Weekly Journal_, the leading Tory paper, and was
subjected to growing attacks in the Whig press. One can hardly doubt
that this paragraph is a thinly veiled defense of his own practice as
a professional journalist.

It is no surprise to find the author of _A Vindication_, in discussing
the qualifications of writers, advocating the importance of genius and
"Natural Parts" above mere learning. He instances the author of _The
True-Born Englishman_ and Shakespeare, the former "Characteriz'd as a
Person of Little Learning, but of prodigious Natural Parts" and the
latter having "but a small share of Literature." The further example
of the literary achievements of the "Fair Sex," who had, of course, no
university education, reminds one of Defoe's championship elsewhere of