LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF ROBINSON CRUSOE. BY DANIEL DE FOE. INCLUDING A MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR AND AN ESSAY ON HIS WRITINGS. NEW YORK AND CHICAGO: BUTLER BROTHERS. 1887. MEMOIR OF DE FOE. DANIEL FOE, or, as he subsequently styled himself (though at what time and on what occasion is not known), De Foe, was born in the parish of St. Giles's, Cripplegate, London, in the year 1661. The earliest of his ancestors of whom there is any account, was Daniel Foe, a yeoman, who farmed his own estate at Elton, in Northamptonshire. He maintained a pack of hounds; from whence it may be reasonably reasonably inferred that his means were above competency. A custom of the times in bestowing party names on brutes is thus mentioned by our author: " I remember," he says, "my grandfather had a huntsman that used the same familiarity with his dogs; and he had his Roundhead, and his Cavalier, and his Goring, and his Waller, and all the generals of both armies were hounds in his pack; till the times turning, the old gentleman was fain to scatter his pack, and make them up of more dog-like surnames." It is from his grandfather that De Foe is supposed to have inherited landed property: for in his "Review," a work we shall often have occasion to consult, he says, "I have both a native and an acquired right of election." Our author's father, James Foe, followed the trade of butcher, in St. Giles's, Cripplegate; and these few barren facts are all that is to be gathered of the ancestors of Daniel De Foe. "He had," says Mr. Wilson, in his excellent work, "The Life and Times of Daniel De Foe," a work abounding with the most curious and minute information on the period of which it treats-" He had some collateral relatives, to whom he alludes occasionally in his writings, but with too much brevity to ascertain the degree of kindred." " At an early age, De Foe is said to have shown that vivacity of humor, and that indomitable spirit of independence, that remained with him through after life, "making a sunshine in the shady place of a pri on, and arming him as the champion of truth in humanity in the most perilous times. An anecdote related by our author is illustrative of the discipline that governed the home of his boyhood. During that part of the reign of Charles II. when the nation feared the ascendency of Popery, and it was expected that printed Bibles would become rare, many honest people employed themselves in copying the Bible into short-hand. To this task young De Foe applied himself; and he tells us that "he worked like a horse till he had written out the whole of the Pentateuch, when he grew so tired |