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Updated: June 9, 2025
While we were at war with France, and commonplace hunters after popularity were doing their utmost to flatter the national vanity, Defoe boldly announced his intention of setting forth the wonderful greatness of the French nation, the enormous numbers of their armies, the immense wealth of their treasury, the marvellous vigour of their administration.
"I am not the first," Defoe said in another place, "that has been stoned for saying the truth. I cannot but think that as time and the conviction of their senses will restore men to love the peace now established in this nation, so they will gradually see I have acted no part but that of a lover of my country, and an honest man."
Barker, the novelist; Aaron Hill; a Mr. Osborne, possibly the bookseller whose name was afterward infamously connected with Eliza's in "The Dunciad"; Charles de La Faye, the under-secretary of state with whom Defoe corresponded; and a sprinkling of aristocratic titles.
It is curious to find among the Serious Reflections a passage which may be taken as an apology for the practices into which Defoe, gradually, we may reasonably believe, allowed himself to fall.
On these and other points Delaune's book was never answered for the reason, I believe, that it never could be. After the Act of Toleration it was often reprinted; the eighth and last time in 1706, when the High Church movement to persecute Dissent had assumed dangerous strength, with an excellent preface by Defoe, and concluding with the letters to Dr. Calamy, written by Delaune from Newgate.
When Defoe came to Penzance, he seems to have been surprised to find it so civilised and so comfortable, "being so remote from London, which is the centre of our wealth." That is the remark of a true Londoner, showing an attitude of mind towards the provincial that is not quite extinct.
Defoe wrote in 1727 that they were still worn by some of the residents, and he then described them as 'rich with embroidery and embossed work of silver, that indeed it was a kind of load to stand under them. A story is sometimes told of Warburton, when Prebendary of Durham in 1759, throwing off his cope in a pet, and never wearing it again, because it disturbed his wig.
Colonel Newport is well known to have been cited as an historical authority; and we have ourselves found great difficulty in convincing many of our friends that Defoe was not himself the citizen, who relates the plague of London.
I might almost say it was the whole. A few reminiscences of Poe, Defoe, and Washington Irving, a copy of Johnson's Buccaneers, the name of the Dead Man's Chest from Kingsley's At Last, some recollections of canoeing on the high seas, and the map itself, with its infinite, eloquent suggestion, made up the whole of my materials.
At any rate, by these and other means she attained that great result of the novel which has been noted in Defoe, in Richardson, and in others the result of what the French vividly call enfisting the reader getting hold of his attention, absorbing him in a pleasant fashion.
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