senting a youthful experience and a youthful spirit, to be followed by arduous labor in a profession. Defoe was nearly sixty years old when he wrote his famous book, and was broken by years of toil and trouble. He was born in London in 1659.1 His father and his grandfather before him wrote their name Foe, and apparently the form DeFoe or Defoe grew out of the signature D. Foe which the author used in the early years of his career. Daniel's father was a butcher and a Nonconformist, who intended his son to be a minister, and placed him at school for this purpose. The boy continued in study with this in view until he was nineteen, when he abruptly turned aside from the plan to make him a minister and took up the trade of a hosier. His own explanation, later in life, indicates that he saw in the profession as then followed an ignoble set of men, too dependent on denominational aid and liable to be hampered in the free expression of their opinion. He was not forced out of the pulpit by any lack of religious feeling, for he appears to have remained through life a man of strong religious nature, but in all probability he felt, rather than clearly saw, as a young man, that his restless, impetuous spirit, and his sensitive temperament ill fitted him for a position calling for circumspect behavior and repression of self.

At the school where he was trained he had this advantage, which he might have missed in more strictly academic centres, of being well drilled in the use of the English language, and inasmuch as the school was connected with a party which was political as well as religious, and the time of his youth was one of great strife in church and state, Defoe, instinct with a love of contention, quickly learned to be a pamphleteer and debater instead of a preacher of sermons. He began writing when he was about twenty-four, and his authorship seems to have been as early as his establishment in trade on his own account, and just previous to his marriage, which took place on New Year's Day, 1684.

It is well to look for a moment at the England of Defoe's early manhood, for he was to play no unimportant part in the affairs which marked the close of the personal monarchy and the establishment of constitutional monarchy. The rising tide of protest on the part of the great middle class of English people was nearing its flood when Defoe came into the use of his powers. The short-lived Commonwealth under Cromwell came to an end at the time of Defoe's birth, but though the Stuart family returned to the throne, bringing with it a more or less open friendliness with the Church of Rome, the Protestant faith was more deeply established and had its stronghold in the mercantile class. King Charles II. had lived during his enforced absence from England in full view of the French court, and the absolutism of the French monarch was his ideal. He was not a man of religious feelings, and for policy he upheld the established Church of England, but such sympathy as he had with religion belonged with the faith supported by the king of France. Meanwhile the Church of England, which was strongly in the ascendancy in government, used the Nonconformists with great harshness, with the result that a common cause was made between politics and religion, and Parliament began slowly to array itself against the king. Charles was secretly a pensioner of Louis XIV., the king of France, who dictated his policy, but so dishonorable a relation, even when not clearly known, could not fail to affect public feeling, and though the English and Dutch had been at war in consequence of the intrigues of Louis, the patriots who were coming into control of England now brought about what is known as the Triple Alliance, by which the three Protestant powers, England, Holland, and Sweden, were banded together to check the movements of Louis.

Charles affected to be at the head of this popular English measure. In reality, he was now entering upon a farther course of duplicity designed to strengthen his personal power and to bring in, there can be little doubt, the supremacy of the Roman Catholic Church. He looked to Louis for aid, and entered into a secret treaty with him by which England was to join France in an attack on Holland. It is difficult for us to understand, and the fact can be explained only by a careful statement of the political complications, how the king plunged England again into war with Holland. The main thing to be borne in mind is the steadily growing alarm in England against the possibility of a substitution of the Roman Catholic faith for Protestantism, an alarm which became little short of a panic when a pretended Popish plot was divulged in 1678. In a series of measures an unsuccessful attempt was made to provide for a Protestant succession by excluding James the brother of Charles II. from a right to the throne, and the Duke of Monmouth, a son of Charles II., appearing to side with the Nonconformists became the hero of the hour. The Whigs, as the opponents of the Tories or court party were called, became at last so frenzied that they were involved in a plot to kill King Charles, and the discovery and punishment of the plot increased for a time the absolutism of Charles.

Suddenly in 1685, Charles died, and was followed by James II., who, once firmly seated, devoted himself quite as strenuously as his brother to accomplishing the same ends. As a consequence Monmouth attempted to concentrate about himself the opposition, and raised an army which was defeated at Sedgemoor, and Monmouth himself was executed. But the king followed his victory with a series of merciless persecutions, and as if to confirm the saying, "whom the Gods destroy they first make mad," he alienated his supporters in the Church of England, heaped favors upon the Roman Catholics, and though he endeavored by a policy of toleration to bring the Nonconformists to his side, his designs were too apparent to blind the more intelligent among them. At last his attacks on the liberty of England aroused such determined antagonism that the Whigs deliberately invited William, Prince of Orange, to come over from Holland and wrest the throne from their own king, and in 1689 a revolution was accomplished by which William and Mary were king and queen of England.

Defoe was no mere pamphleteer in these stirring times. He was out with Monmouth, but though three of his old school-fellows were captured and put to death, Defoe escaped. His business took him on journeys to Spain and Portugal, and he had clearly a strong turn for adventure. But after all, his interest in affairs was political and religious rather than personal. In those days the newspapers were what their name implied, purveyors of news: they did not offer opinions. To discuss the meaning of the news was the business of writers who were on one side or the other in public affairs, often men in the employ of the crown or one of the great noblemen who might be in opposition, and the vehicle of their writing was the pamphlet. An official censorship of the press existed, and the writer of a specially severe attack on the government was in great danger of being arrested and made to play the penalty of a fine or imprisonment.

Defoe welcomed the coming of William with enthusiasm, and during that king's reign, from 1689 to 1702, he was an ardent supporter of the government. The ten years which closed with the king's death were years of prosperity with Defoe. In 1692 he met with business reverses, and for a time his personal affairs were in confusion; but he busied himself with public interests, and was rewarded by an office which appears to have tided him over financial straits. At any rate he again engaged in business, this time in the manufacture of bricks and tiles, and became so prosperous that he shortly wiped out the debts incurred in his former venture. From all appearances Defoe, if he had turned all his energies into business, might have been a very successful man; but from the first he was quite as much concerned with politics and the management of public affairs as with his own private fortune. He signalized himself in 1697 by issuing a pamphlet in defence of the king's policy of maintaining a standing army, in which he showed a trenchant use of the English language and a very strong faculty for argument. In this pamphlet, as in his later writings, he wrote so that everybody could understand what he said, - no mean accomplishment in an age when a