after their
own fashion, had also a hankering after the public service. It is the
true interest of the Dissenters in England, Defoe argued, to be governed
by a Church of England magistracy; and with his usual paradoxical
hardihood, he told his co-religionists bluntly that "the first reason of
his proposition was that they were not qualified to be trusted with the
government of themselves." When we consider the active part Defoe
himself took in public affairs, we shall not be surprised that offence
was given by his countenancing the civil disabilities of Dissenters, and
that the Dissenting preachers declined to recognise him as properly
belonging to their body. It was not, indeed, as a Dissenter that Defoe
was prosecuted by the violent Tories then in power, but as the suspected
literary instrument of the great Whig leaders.

This, of course, in no way diminishes the harsh and spiteful impolicy of
the sentence passed on Defoe. Its terms were duly put in execution. The
offending satirist stood in the pillory on the three last days of July,
1703, before the Royal Exchange in Cornhill, near the Conduit in
Cheapside, and at Temple Bar. It is incorrect, however, to say with Pope
that

"Earless on high stood unabashed Defoe."

His ears were not cropped, as the barbarous phrase went, and he had no
reason to be abashed. His reception by the mob was very different from
that accorded to the anti-Jacobite Fuller, a scurrilous rogue who had
tried to make a few pounds by a Plain Proof that the Chevalier was a
supposititious child. The author of the _True-Born Englishman_ was a
popular favourite, and his exhibition in the pillory was an occasion of
triumph and not of ignominy to him. A ring of admirers was formed round
the place of punishment, and bunches of flowers instead of handfuls of
garbage were thrown at the criminal. Tankards of ale and stoups of wine
were drunk in his honour by the multitude whom he had delighted with his
racy verse and charmed by his bold defiance of the authorities.

The enthusiasm was increased by the timely publication of a _Hymn to the
Pillory_, in which Defoe boldly declared the iniquity of his sentence,
and pointed out to the Government more proper objects of their severity.
Atheists ought to stand there, he said, profligate beaux, swindling
stock-jobbers, fanatic Jacobites, and the commanders who had brought
the English fleet into disgrace. As for him, his only fault lay in his
not being unders