or he went right by mere instinct; or he so identified himself with his imaginary hero, that he became, in fancy, the very individual he was creating, and was therefore, necessarily, always in character. But whatever vigilance he used, he has always the art to appear perfectly unconcerned; there is none of the constraint that usually accompanies a painful effort to support imposture his hero is not stiff and awkward like a puppet, which has no voluntary motion, but moves freely and carelessly along the stage; talks to us in an honest, open, confidential sort of way; lays his inmost thoughts and feelings open before us, as before a confessor, without caution or subterfuge; and by never asking our belief, never seeming conscious of a possibility of its being denied, fairly compels us to grant it.

A circumstance peculiar to the fictions of De Foe, and which greatly tends to give them an air of reality, is that their subjects are not such as are usually adopted by the writers of romance. They think it beneath them to have aught to do with any thing but great names and high rank; or if they ever make a stoop from their greatness, it is to descend at once into the very lowest class of men, whose rudeness has in it something of the picturesque. Between the palace and the hovel there is seldom an intermediate stage for the genius of romance to put up at, and consequently we never expect to meet with the pains-taking people who inhabit houses of brick; dealers in small wares, shop-keepers, and masters of trading vessels, straying through the realms of fiction. Now this is precisely the sort of company into which De Foe introduces us, and their adventures have more the air of matters of fact, in consequence of their names and professions sounding so un-romantic and common-place. There is another peculiarity in his fictions, which is still more remarkable. Our author's indifference to the fair sex is well known, as also that he has fallen under their ban, for having presumed to shew that any story could be made interesting with which they had no concern. Instead, therefore, of the stale and hackneyed subject, a couple of lovers, led through every difficulty and danger which the author could possibly contrive to throw in their way, to be at length crowned with felicity and marriage, he shews us a man struggling for the acquisition of wealth, and getting rich, at all events, by fair means or foul. Of love, at least the sentimental part of it, he clearly has no notion; and marriage, if it happens to be mentioned at all, is quite by the way, purely incidental to the main action, and never allowed to interrupt the grand business of life. When the hero has made his fortune, the author lays down his pen; the interest of the story is at an end.

De Foe himself, during the greater part of his troubled

life, laboured under pecuniary difficulties, and in the end is said to have died insolvent. It would seem, therefore, that he was resolved to feast his imagination with what he could not enjoy in reality; and as he felt the miseries of poverty in his own person, and was probably always speculating for the acquisition of wealth, he was naturally led to consider it the most interesting pursuit in which his hero could possibly be engaged. Whatever truth there may be in this, the propensity to accumulate ideal riches is every where clearly evinced. If his imagination ever grows wanton, it is in some dream of ideal wealth; if it ever warms, it is in the recital of some brisk trade, which his hero is driving at a profit of a hundred per cent. With what complacency will he enumerate the several articles of a rich booty, no matter how obtained! How he revels in the idea of a stream that rolls down sands of gold, or an El-dorado, where it is to be had for the picking up; or an oyster-bed, where every oyster contains a pearl of immense price! He is never contented with small gains, or fond of imaginary unsuccessful speculations, but delights in a lucky adventure, and enriching his hero with the proceeds: to abandon him, indeed, in poverty, seems to him as contrary to all rule, as any other novelist would consider it, to leave his principal personage unmarried. But this is a disposition altogether unheroic, and savours so little of romance: the employment and pursuits of his fictitious heroes constitute so completely the business of the class of people from whom they are taken, and the arts and practices they have recourse to are so much in the way of the world, that we never suspect these matter-of-fact personages of being the unsubstantial creatures of mere invention.

The grand secret of his art, however, if art it can be called, and were not rather an instinct, consists doubtless in the astonishing minuteness of the details, and the circumstantial particularity with which every thing is laid before us. It is by this, perhaps, more than any thing else, that fictitious narratives are distinguishable from the genuine memoirs of those who have been eye-witnesses of what they relate. The facts in the one case may be as probable as in the other; the descriptions as vivid and striking; the style as natural and unconstrained; still there is an indefinable something which seems to be wanting to the former, though we may not have remarked its presence in the latter. Some unimportant particular, some minute circumstance, which none but he who had seen with his eyes would have thought of remarking, will always serve, like the scarcely discernible lines on a genuine note, to distinguish between the true and the counterfeit. The eye of imagination, however strong and piercing, cannot always pervade the whole scene, and

see every thing distinctly; the more prominent features, indeed, it may develope with the clearness and accuracy of an almost unclouded vision, but all besides is either obscured with mist or lost in impenetrable shade, and he who paints from the ideal, must consequently either leave these parts unfinished, or spread his colours at random. It is the singular merit of De Foe to have overcome this difficulty, and to have communicated to his fictitious narratives every characteristic mark by which we distinguish between real and pretended adventures. The whole scene lay expanded before him in the fullness of light and life, and down to the minutesț particular every thing is delineated with truth and accuracy. It is not necessary that we should have the light fall advantageously, or wink with our eyes, in order to make the delusion complete by hiding the defects, and softening down the harsh lines of the representation; the most penetrating gaze, aided by the strongest light, cannot detect the imposition or distinguish between the shade and the substance. Writers of fiction may in general be said rather to shadow forth than fully to delineate their visions, either because they flit away too early, or are never seen with sufficient distinctness: like the first discoverers of countries, they trace out a few promontories on their chart, and give a faint outline of something indistinctly seen. In the solitude of his closet, De Foe could travel round the world in idea, seeing every thing with the distinctness of natural vision, and noting every thing with the minuteness of the most accurate observer. His chart presents us not merely with the bold headland, shooting forth into the deep, or the clearly defined mountain that rises into middle air behind: we have the whole coast fully and fairly traced out, with the soundings of every bay, the direction of every current, and the quarter of every wind that blows.

The possession of this marvellous faculty has enabled him to communicate such an air of truth and reality to his fictions, that we are inclined to doubt, whether human life was ever before or has ever since been so faithfully represented, and to suspect that every other author has, more or less, exaggerated or distorted, exalted or debased, the nature from which he drew. It may appear to savour somewhat of paradox, but we will venture to affirm, that De Foe was not more indebted for this superiority to the possession of the single faculty we have mentioned, than to the want of those other powers by which more highly gifted authors have been distinguished. These latter have enabled their possessors to excite every emotion in their readers which the human breast is capable of feeling, but at the same time they have unfitted them to be the humble copyists of nature, and the faithful historians of

human life. We mean not to deny that nature formed the ground-work of their fictions, and supplied the elements of their characters, but it was nature wrought up to a higher pitch, and raised far above the level of common life. In their plots, for instance, instead of the ordinary number of events, which would naturally arise in the course of any series of years, we find an assemblage of strange and diverting incidents, such as never occur in the experience of one man, or of any given number of men. The imaginary persons who occupy the several scenes of this drama, are not only of much larger proportions than ordinary people, but form a collection of curious and eccentric characters, such as were never crowded together in any single stage of real life. Their wit, instead of flowing in the scanty stream, in which it really pervades the intercourse of fashionable life, is poured along in a mighty tide, of which the most brilliant society furnishes no example: their dialogue, as has been justly observed of one of them, is not the conversation of gentlemen, but the combat of intellectual gladiators. Their humour is a concentration of all the humours of all mankind, and runs through their works in a vein so rich, as at every page to excite the laugh that will not be controlled, whereas the dull and serious drama of the world seldom furnishes just occasion even for a smile. The passions, as they are pourtrayed by these writers, have an energy and terror more than mortal; and grief in particular, an uninviting thing enough in the world of real woe, is clothed with such an air of elegance and refinement, that it becomes a luxury in spite of fact, and is called the joy of grief; the favourite paradox of sickly poets. Then their descriptions of the visible world have a splendour and an illusion inconsistent with the sobriety of reality, and, instead of reminding the reader of earthly scenes, fill his imagination with the wonders of paradise, and the fabled glories of Elysium. In a word, they present us not with a chapter or two of human life, but an epitome of the whole, in which every detail is abridged, and none but the most surprising events fully developed. All that the writer's experience can furnish of the curious and diverting, whether facts or characters, gathered from every scene of life, and from among every class of men, is crowded into the narrative of a few and concenyears, trated on a single stage. This quick succession of incidents, in themselves strange and various, together with the strong contrast produced by the opposition of character, eccentric or exaggerated, produces an effect delightful to the imagination, but no more resembling the tenour of real life, than a landscape, in which the productions of all climates and seasons should be grouped together, would be like a scene of the true picturesque. To delight and astonish, are perhaps the legitimate

ends of fiction, and it may be necessary to heighten every colour, and strengthen every shade, in order to produce this effect. We will go still farther, and allow that even, for the purposes of instruction, it may be expedient to exaggerate and embellish, in like manner as extreme cases are put to demonstrate truths, which escape our observation in the course of actual experience. But whilst the reader, especially the youthful one, is delighted and astonished, perhaps instructed; yet, since the characters with whom he converses in the world of fiction are so humorous and eccentric, their wit so brilliant and redundant, the turns of fortune so strange and unexpected, he is led either to form a very erroneous estimate of real life, or, if his limited experience enable him to correct his judgment, is inspired with a premature and morbid distaste for its comparative languor and insipidity.

We shall perhaps illustrate our meaning by an actual comparison, in one or two instances, between De Foe and the writers to whom we have alluded. Both he and Smollett have given us successful representations of a sailor's life, but in a very different style, and with very different effect. De Foe's sailor is of the ordinary description of men, one out of a thousand, with nothing very striking or characteristic about him; the sailor in Smollett is altogether an extraordinary being, whose every action is uncouth, and every expression ludicrous. The one has the usual marks of a sailor, but has every thing else in common with the rest of mankind; the other seems to belong to a different species; a creature formed and bred at sea, having a set of ideas, and modes of speaking and acting perfectly distinct from those possessed by the men who live on shore. The one has merely the technical phrase and vices, the homeliness and simplicity, peculiar to his profession; the other is not so much an individual character, as an abstract of the humour of the whole British navy. The one is an every-day kind of person, whom we have seen a hundred times; the other is a most amusing but imaginary being, whom we have never met with but in the inimitable pages of his creator. In like manner Col. Jack is a common thief; one of the multitudes that infest the streets of the metropolis, and every session sees him hung at Tyburn. But Jonathan Wild is a compound of elaborate villainy, whom nature never made; the materials indeed she furnished, but the workmanship is Fielding's, and his alone. An acquaintance with one or two of the tribe; a slight study of the Newgate calendar, or an occasional visit to the office in Bow-street; would suffice to enable the inventive genius of De Foe to delineate the features of an ordinary pickpocket; but the rogue of Fielding is the production of one, who had made villainy his study, and contemplated it in every possible variety.