it inserted
in any of the journals without feeing the journalists or publishers. I
cannot but have the vanity to think they might as well have inserted
what I send them, _gratis_, as many things I have since seen in their
papers. But I have not only had the mortification to find what I sent
rejected, but to lose my originals, not having taken copies of what I
wrote." In this preface Defoe makes touching allusion to his age and
infirmities. He begs his readers to "excuse the vanity of an
over-officious old man, if, like Cato, he inquires whether or no before
he goes hence and is no more, he can yet do anything for the service of
his country." "The old man cannot trouble you long; take, then, in good
part his best intentions, and impute his defects to age and weakness."

[Footnote 7: Lee's _Life_, vol. i. p. 418.]

This preface was written in 1728; what happened to Defoe in the
following year is much more difficult to understand, and is greatly
complicated by a long letter of his own which has been preserved.
Something had occurred, or was imagined by him to have occurred, which
compelled him to fly from his home and go into hiding. He was at work on
a book to be entitled _The Complete English Gentleman_. Part of it was
already in type when he broke off abruptly in September, 1729, and fled.
In August, 1730, he sent from a hiding-place, cautiously described as
being about two miles from Greenwich, a letter to his son-in-law, Baker,
which is our only clue to what had taken place. It is so incoherent as
to suggest that the old man's prolonged toils and anxieties had at last
shaken his reason, though not his indomitable self-reliance. Baker
apparently had written complaining that he was debarred from seeing him.
"Depend upon my sincerity for this," Defoe answers, "that I am far from
debarring you. On the contrary, it would be a greater comfort to me than
any I now enjoy that I could have your agreeable visits with safety, and
could see both you and my dear Sophia, could it be without giving her
the grief of seeing her father _in tenebris_, and under the load of
insupportable sorrows." He gives a touching description of the griefs
which are preying upon his mind.

"It is not the blow I received from a wicked, perjured,
and contemptible enemy that has broken in upon my spirit;
which, as she well knows, has carried me on through greater
disasters than these. But it has been the injustice, unkindness,
and, I mu