have
unanimously declared his pamphlets to be treasonable, and that one of
them, on his pleading that they were ironical, should have told him it
was a kind of irony for which he might come to be hanged, drawn, and
quartered, is not so easy to understand, unless we suppose that, in
these tempestuous times, judges like other men were powerfully swayed by
party feeling. It is possible, however, that they deemed the mere titles
of the pamphlets offences in themselves, disturbing cries raised while
the people were not yet clear of the forest of anarchy, and still
subject to dangerous panics--offences of the same nature as if a man
should shout fire in sport in a crowded theatre. Possibly, also, the
severity of the Court was increased by Defoe's indiscretion in
commenting upon the case in the _Review_, while it was still _sub
judice_. At any rate he escaped punishment. The Attorney-General was
ordered to prosecute him, but before the trial came off Defoe obtained a
pardon under the royal seal.

The Whigs were thus baulked of revenge upon their renegade. Their loyal
writers attributed Defoe's pardon to the secret Jacobitism of the
Ministry--- quite wrongly--as we have just seen he was acting for Harley
as a Hanoverian and not as a Jacobite. Curiously enough, when Defoe next
came before the Queen's Bench, the instigator of the prosecution was a
Tory, and the Government was Whig, and he again escaped from the
clutches of the law by the favour of the Government. Till Mr. William
Lee's remarkable discovery, fourteen years ago, of certain letters in
Defoe's handwriting in the State Paper Office, it was generally believed
that on the death of Queen Anne, the fall of the Tory Administration,
and the complete discomfiture of Harley's trimming policy, the veteran
pamphleteer and journalist, now fifty-three years of age, withdrew from
political warfare, and spent the evening of his life in the composition
of those works of fiction which have made his name immortal. His
biographers had misjudged his character and underrated his energy. When
Harley fell from power, Defoe sought service under the Whigs. He had
some difficulty in regaining their favour, and when he did obtain
employment from them, it was of a kind little to his honour.

In his _Appeal to Honour and Justice_, published early in 1715, in which
he defended himself against the charges copiously and virulently urged
of being a party-writer, a hireling, and a turncoat, and exp