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Updated: June 9, 2025
Haywood, while other students of Defoe, Leslie Stephen, Lee, Wright, and Professor Trent, are unanimous in their opinion that the first exploiter of the dumb wizard could have had no hand in the writing of these amplifications. The latest bibliographer of romances and tales, Mr. Arundell Esdaile, however, follows the B.M. catalogue in listing The Dumb Projector under the convenient name of Defoe.
No writer before him, except Defoe, had such a wide knowledge of the technicalities of different men's occupations, and of all sorts of the processes of daily business, nor could enlighten an abstract matter with such a wealth of luminous analogy.
Above all, he read Defoe, and in the third chapter of "Lavengro" he has described his first sight of "Robinson Crusoe" as a little child: "The first object on which my eyes rested was a picture; it was exceedingly well executed, at least the scene which it represented made a vivid impression upon me, which would hardly have been the case had the artist not been faithful to nature.
But that the Court of Queen's Bench, before whom Defoe was brought with some difficulty, it would appear, for he had fortified his house at Newington like Robinson Crusoe's castle should have unanimously declared his pamphlets to be treasonable, and that one of them, on his pleading that they were ironical, should have told him it was a kind of irony for which he might come to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, is not so easy to understand, unless we suppose that, in these tempestuous times, judges like other men were powerfully swayed by party feeling.
Even a casual reading of Robinson Crusoe , which generally heads the list of modern fiction, shows that this exciting tale is largely an adventure story, rather than the study of human character which Defoe probably intended it to be.
Poet, b. at Borderstown, New Jersey, was successively a lawyer, a soldier, and a journalist, in which last capacity he ed. Critic and dramatist, belonged to a Roman Catholic family, and was an unsuccessful playwright, a literary hack, and a critic of little acumen or discrimination. He attacked Pope as "Sawny Dapper," and was in return embalmed in The Dunciad. He also wrote a Life of Defoe.
This was the appointment which he held while he was challenging his enemies to say whether his outward circumstances looked like the figure the agents of Courts and Princes make. The services on which Defoe was employed were, as before, of two kinds, active and literary.
A young Englishman representing the Society of Friends, who in that tragic time did work worthy of the Good Samaritan, reported what he saw in Mayo and Galway in language which for plain vigor rivals the narratives of Defoe.
One cannot conveniently rank Swift with the great quartette of the next chapter, because he is a novelist "by interim" and incompletely: to rank him among the minor and later novelists of the eighteenth century would be as to the first part of the classification absurd and as to the last false. And he comes, not merely in time, pretty close to Defoe, incommensurable as is the genius of the two.
Review, let's have now and then a touch of something else to make us merry." But Defoe assures his readers he means to go on writing about the Union until he can see some prospect of calm among the men who are trying to make dispeace. "Then I shall be the first that shall cease calling upon them to Peace."
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