the
_Elegy on the Author of the True-Born Englishman_, which he published
immediately after his discharge, that he should keep silence for seven
years, or at least "not write what some people might not like." To the
public he represented himself as a martyr grudgingly released by the
Government, and restrained from attacking them only by his own bond and
the fear of legal penalties.

"Memento Mori here I stand,
With silent lips but speaking hand;
A walking shadow of a Poet,
But bound to hold my tongue and never show it.
A monument of injury,
A sacrifice to legal t(yrann)y."

"For shame, gentlemen," he humorously cries to his enemies, "do not
strike a dead man; beware, scribblers, of fathering your pasquinades
against authority upon me; for seven years the True-Born Englishman is
tied under sureties and penalties not to write."

"To seven long years of silence I betake,
Perhaps by then I may forget to speak."

This elegy he has been permitted to publish as his last speech and dying
confession--

"When malefactors come to die
They claim uncommon liberty:
Freedom of speech gives no distaste,
They let them talk at large, because they talk their last."

The public could hardly have supposed from this what Defoe afterwards
admitted to have been the true state of the case, namely, that on
leaving prison he was taken into the service of the Government. He
obtained an appointment, that is to say a pension, from the Queen, and
was employed on secret services. When charged afterwards with having
written by Harley's instructions, he denied this, but admitted the
existence of certain "capitulations," in which he stipulated for liberty
to write according to his own judgment, guided only by a sense of
gratitude to his benefactor. There is reason to believe that even this
is not the whole truth. Documents which Mr. Lee recently brought to
light make one suspect that Defoe was all the time in private relations
with the leaders of the Whig party. Of this more falls to be said in
another place. The True-Born Englishman was, indeed, dead. Defoe was no
longer the straightforward advocate of King William's policy. He was
engaged henceforward in serving two masters, persuading each that he
served him alone, and persuading the public, in spite of numberless
insinuations, that he served nobody but them and himself, and wrote
simply as a free lance under the jealous sufferance of the Governmen