few movements of the wheel of Fortune might make his own.

But whatever it was that made the germ idea of _Robinson Crusoe_ take
root in Defoe's mind, he worked it out as an artist. Artists of a more
emotional type might have drawn much more elaborate and affecting
word-pictures of the mariner's feelings in various trying situations,
gone much deeper into his changing moods, and shaken our souls with pity
and terror over the solitary castaway's alarms and fits of despair.
Defoe's aims lay another way. His Crusoe is not a man given to the
luxury of grieving. If he had begun to pity himself, he would have been
undone. Perhaps Defoe's imaginative force was not of a kind that could
have done justice to the agonies of a shipwrecked sentimentalist; he has
left no proof that it was: but if he had represented Crusoe bemoaning
his misfortunes, brooding over his fears, or sighing with Ossianic
sorrow over his lost companions and friends, he would have spoiled the
consistency of the character. The lonely man had his moments of panic
and his days of dejection, but they did not dwell in his memory. Defoe
no doubt followed his own natural bent, but he also showed true art in
confining Crusoe's recollections as closely as he does to his efforts to
extricate himself from difficulties that would have overwhelmed a man of
softer temperament. The subject had fascinated him, and he found enough
in it to engross his powers without travelling beyond its limits for
diverting episodes, as he does more or less in all the rest of his
tales. The diverting episodes in _Robinson Crusoe_ all help the
verisimilitude of the story.

When, however, the ingenious inventor had completed the story
artistically, carried us through all the outcast's anxieties and
efforts, and shown him triumphant over all difficulties, prosperous, and
again in communication with the outer world, the spirit of the iterary
trader would not let the finished work alone. The story, as a work of
art, ends with Crusoe's departure from the island, or at any rate with
his return to England. Its unity is then complete. But Robinson Crusoe
at once became a popular hero, and Defoe was too keen a man of business
to miss the chance of further profit from so lucrative a vein. He did
not mind the sneers of hostile critics. They made merry over the
trifling inconsistencies in the tale. How, for example, they asked,
could Crusoe have stuffed his pockets with biscuits when he had taken
off