in a paper in
_Applebee's Journal_. But at the very heart of the genius of Defoe lay
the spirit of the tradesman. It burns like a farthing rushlight in the
midst of a richly furnished room. Whoever wants to understand Defoe
must study his mind by this light. He declined to fill a pulpit
because, in the language of the shop, "it did not pay." Already, that
is when he was about two-and-twenty years old, he was writing
pamphlets on Protestantism, on Popular Liberties, and the like, and he
also appears to have taken part in the Duke of Monmouth's rising.

In 1685 he opened a shop as a hosier in Freeman's Court, Cornhill.
There is nothing memorable to record of him while he was in this line
of trade, saving that in 1688, at the Revolution, he made haste to
accentuate his adhesion to William III. by joining a company of
volunteer horse, a royal regiment made up of the principal citizens of
London: these men, gallantly mounted and richly accoutred, with Defoe
in their midst and the Earl of Monmouth at their head, guarded the
king and queen to a banquet at Whitehall. His prosperity as a hosier
ended in 1692, in which year he fled to Bristol, a bankrupt, with
debts, according to his own showing, amounting to seventeen thousand
pounds. He did not, however, long lie in hiding. In recognition of his
services as a pamphleteer, the post of accountant to the Commissioners
of the Glass Duty was given to him. We then find him prospering again.
He started a brick-making manufactory at Tilbury, and set up a coach
and a pleasure-boat. His pen, moreover, was ceaselessly employed; the
titles of the productions of a single month would more than fill the
slender space allotted me. He fought for Non-conformity till 1698,
then broke with the Dissenters because of their practice of occasional
conformity, which, he pretends, disgusted him. His argument was, let a
man be wholly a Dissenter, or wholly a Churchman. But don't let him go
to chapel one Sunday and church the next. He can never be taken
seriously, however, in these short flights any more than in his long
novels. There is no consistency in his writings, because there is no
conscience in his opinions. In his "The Shortest Way with the
Dissenters," he faces about, and the man who was at war with Howe, the
most eloquent of Non-conformist divines, second only to Jeremy Taylor
in richness of thought and splendor of diction, is, on the merits of
that piece of irony, accepted by posterity as the