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DANIEL, the son of James Foe, citizen and butcher, was born in London, in the parish of Cripplegate, in or about the year 1663: at what time, or on what account he prefixed the syllable De to his paternal name, does not clearly appear. He was a Dissenter himself, and appears to have been of a dissenting family. Early imbued with a dread of Papal ascendancy, he took up arms to support the Duke of Monmouth's insurrection, and was fortunate in escaping not only the sword, but the legal consequences of that rash adventure. In 1685 he went into business as a hosier, in Freeman's Yard, Cornhill. He was not successful, probably because his attention was engrossed by affairs foreign to his trade; for he not only mingled in the political and religious dissensions of that stormy time, but was too much occupied, according to his biographer Mr.

Chalmers, by engagements, which became neither the conscientious dissenter, nor the steady man of business. "With the usual imprudence of superior genius, he was carried by his vivacity into companies who were gratified by his wit, and he spent those hours in the idle hilarity of the tavern, which he ought to have employed in the calculations of the counting-house; and being obliged to abscond from his creditors in 1692, he attributed those misfortunes to the war, which were doubtless owing to his own misconduct. He afterwards carried on the brick and pantile works near Tilbury Fort, though probably with no success. He was in after-times wittily reproached, that he did not, like the Egyptians, require bricks without straw, but, like the Jews, required bricks without paying his labourers.' He was born for other enterprises, which, if they did not gain him wealth, have conferred a renown, that will descend the current of time with the language wherein his works are written." His misfortunes however, even if accompanied by some imprudence, did not alienate his friends. "I was invited," he says in his Appeal to Honour and Justice, " by some merchants with whom I had corresponded abroad, and some also at home, to settle at Cadiz, and that with offers of very good commissions; but Providence, which had other work for me to do, placed a secret aversion in my mind. Some time after, I was, without the least application of mine, and being then seventy miles from London, sent for to be Accomptant to the Commissioners of the Glass Duty; in which service I continued to the determination of their commission."

Having lost this occupation, Defoe's active mind expanded itself in a variety of schemes. He wrote, he tells us, many sheets about the coin; he proposed a law for registering seamen; he projected county

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banks; factories for goods; a commission of inquiry into the estates of bankrupts; a pension-office for the relief of the poor; an academy "to encourage polite learning, and to polish and refine the English tongue;" and an academy for the education of women, with a view to the improvement of society, by training them to a more exemplary discharge of their social duties. Notices of various of these schemes, and of the use or abuse of a speculative spirit in a mercantile country, will be found in his Essay on Projects, published in January, 1697. In 1701 he produced a satire in verse, called The Trueborn Englishman, which arose out of a personal and virulent attack by one Tutchen, on William III., whose faults were finally summed up in the epithet 'foreigner." "This," Defoe says, "filled me with a kind of rage against the book, and gave birth to a trifle, which I never could hope should have met with such general acceptation as it did I mean, The True-born Englishman. How this poem was the occasion of my being known to his Majesty ; how I afterwards was received by him; how employed; and how, above all my capacity of deserving, rewarded, is no part of the present case :" and history does not supply us with the particulars here left unnoticed. But whatever were Defoe's services or their rewards, he always expressed his gratitude and affection for King William's memory in ardent terms. In the same year he published two able tracts in support of the principles of the Revolution, entitled, one, The Original Power of the Collective Body of the People of England Examined and Asserted; the other, The Freeholder's Plea against the Stock-jobbing Elections of Parliamentmen. The following pithy sentence may give some notion of the general tenor of the latter:-" It is very rational to suppose that those who buy will sell,

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or what seems more rational, they who have bought, must sell." In these pieces the ultimate resort of all power in the people, and the responsibility of the parliament to the people, inasmuch, to use his own words elsewhere, as the person sent is less than the sender," are forcibly explained and asserted. The same principles were developed more strongly in what is commonly called The Legion Letter, a remonstrance against certain exertions of the privilege of parliament, by which the subject's right of petitioning was thought to be curtailed. This remarkable paper, which, though never clearly avowed, is believed to have been written by Defoe, and presented by him, dressed in women's clothes, to the Speaker, was entitled, A Memorial from the Gentlemen, Freeholders, and Inhabitants of the Counties of in behalf of themselves, and many thousands of the good people of England, to the Knights, Citizens and Burgesses in Parliament assembled; and ends in the following words: "For Englishmen are no more to be slaves to Parliaments than to Kings.

"Our name is LEGION,
"And we are MANY.

"If you require to have this Memorial signed with our names, it shall be done, on your first orders, and formally presented."

Of this attempt to intimidate the House no open notice was taken, nor does it appear to have been known at the time who was the author. But any ill-will which the Tories might have against Defoe, if suspected, was gratified by the consequences of a pamphlet which he published in 1702, entitled, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, or Proposals for the Establishment of the Church. In this ironical performance, which ostensibly recommends the total extirpation of Dissenters from England, he intended

to satirize the blind prejudices and headstrong zeal of the high Tory faction: but he had the misfortune to raise up enemies on every side. Some of the Dissenters took it literally, and raised an outcry against him as a persecutor: the Tories understood it better, and had influence enough to get a prosecution commenced against him, and a reward offered for his apprehension, by the government. The House of Commons voted the book a libel, and ordered it to be burnt by the hangman. The printer and the publisher of it were taken into custody, upon which Defoe, who had secreted himself, came forward, "to throw himself upon the favour of Government, rather than that others should be ruined for his mistakes." He was tried in July, 1703, found guilty of composing and publishing a seditious libel, and, by a very oppressive sentence, was condemned to be imprisoned, to stand in the pillory, to pay a fine of 200 marks, and to find security for his good behaviour during seven years. It is in allusion to this that Pope, who ought to have better appreciated such a man, has made an unworthy attack upon Defoe in the Dunciad, Earless on high stood unabash'd Defoe.

He had no reason to be, and was not, abashed; and he composed a Hymn to the Pillory, and an Elegy on the Author of a True-born Englishman, esteeming himself defunct as an author, when he was obliged to find sureties for good behaviour. These, like all his works, contain the energetic expression of an independent spirit: to poetical merit they have no claim.

Early in 1704, while he was still in prison, Defoe commenced a periodical paper, entitled The Review, which, in addition to the usual topics of news, contained a report of the proceedings of a Scandal Club, which discusses questions in divinity, morals,

VOL. III.

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