the English admiral. No one doubts that a part of one of Jenkins's ears was cut off; it will be seen in this volume that he actually at one time exhibited the severed part; but the question is, How did it come to be severed? It might have been cut off in the ordinary course of a scuffle with the Spanish revenue officers who tried to search his vessel. The point of the story is that Jenkins said the ear was deliberately severed, and that the severed part was flung in his face with the insulting injunction to take that home to his King. Whether Jenkins told the simple truth or indulged in a little fable is a question which the recently-published correspondence does not in any way help us to settle.

J. MCC.

A HISTORY

OF

THE FOUR GEORGES

CHAPTER XXI.

BOLINGBROKE ROUTED AGAIN.

WHILE 'the King's friends' and the Patriots, otherwise the Court party and the country party, were speech-making and pamphleteering, one of the greatest English pamphleteers, who was also one of the masters of English fiction, passed quietly out of existence. On April 24, 1731, Daniel Defoe died. It does not belong to the business of this history to narrate the life, or describe the works, of Defoe. The book on which his fame will chiefly rest was published just twelve years before his death. 'Robinson Crusoe' first thrilled the world in 1719. Robinson Crusoe' has a place in literature as unassailable as 'Gulliver's Travels' or as 'Don Quixote.' Rousseau in his Emile' declares that Robinson Crusoe should for a long time be his pupil's sole library, and that it would ever after through life be

VOL. II.

B

to him one of his dearest intellectual companions. At the present time, it is said, English school-boys do not read 'Robinson Crusoe.' There are laws of literary reaction in the tastes of schoolboys as of older people; there were days when the English public did not read Shakespeare. But it was certain that Shakespeare would come up again, and it is certain that Robinson Crusoe will come up again. Defoe had been a fierce fighter in the political literature of his time, and that was a trying time for the political gladiator. He had, according to his own declaration, been thirteen times rich and thirteen times poor. He had always written according to his convictions, and he had a spirit that no enemy could cow, and that no persecution could break. He had had the most wonderful ups and downs of fortune. He had been patronised by sovereigns and persecuted by statesmen. He had been fined; he had been pensioned; he had been sent on political missions by one Minister, and he had been clapped into Newgate by another. He had been applauded in the streets and he had been hooted in the pillory. Had he not written 'Robinson Crusoe,' he would still have held a high place in English literature, because of the other romances that came from his teeming brain, and because of the political tracts that made so deep and lasting an impression even in that age of famous political tracts. But Robinson Crusoe' is to his other works like Aaron's serpent, or the one master-passion in the breast,' which the poet has compared with it-it'swallows all the rest.'