in 1717 (printed 1753). At Fontainebleau he wrote his Letters on the Study and Use of History (1735), and his Letter on the Use of Retirement. From his house in Battersea he published, in 1749, his Letters on the Spirit of Patriotism and his Idea of a Patriot King, Pope's treatment of which latter work constitutes one of the famous scandals of the eighteenth century. Mallet published the complete works of Lord Bolingbroke in 1753-4, and it was in reference to this edition that Dr. Johnson said of Bolingbroke, "He was a scoundrel and a coward, a scoundrel for charging a blunderbuss against religion and morality; a coward because he had not resolution to fire it off himself, but left half a crown to a beggarly Scotchman to draw the trigger after his death." The personal magnetism of Bolingbroke must have been very great; he dazzled his own generation, where he merely wearies ours. His boasted style, though unquestionably lucid, is slipshod and full of platitudes, grandiloquent and yet ineffectual. His Patriot King is his most pleasing effort; it is a study of an ideal constitutional monarch, intended to justify a sort of paternal right of kings from the standpoint of the Whigs. But criticism now merely smiles at the author's impudent assumption of the airs of a great political philosopher.

At the close of this chapter we may briefly enumerate the most distinguished names in the curious group of acknowledged deists who made their appearance at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The controversy was opened on the orthodox side by Charles Leslie (1650-1722), an Irish non-juror. He darted A Snake in the Grass (1696) against the Quakers; but his most famous and effective work was his Short and easy Method with the Deists (1697). Twenty-seven treatises are attributed to his fluent and truculent pen. Leslie was a Jacobite, and in 1710 he fled to Bar-le-duc to the Pretender, with whom he resided in extreme discomfort for eleven years. Dr. Matthew Tindal (1656-1733), who attacked the High Church party in The Rights of the Christian Church (1706), and Corah and Moses (1727), caused a great scandal by the publication of his Christianity as old as the Creation,

in 1730. Tindal was a Christian, although on the very borders of infidelity. A bolder and less scrupulous deist was Janus Junius Toland (1670-1722); he professed to be a pupil and confidant of Locke, who repudiated the soft impeachment. Toland was said to be the illegitimate son of an Irish priest, and his life was spent in the purlieus of Grub Street. Toland, nevertheless, had great talent; his Christianity not Mysterious (1696) is a very original and striking tract, which was received with a howl of indignation. He wrote much more, but nothing so clever as this his first publication. William Wollaston (1659-1724) produced an extremely popular work entitled The Religion of Nature delineated (1722), a contribution to constructive deism. Anthony Collins (1676-1729) defended rationalism against the onslaughts of Leslie, but brought down such a storm on his head that he escaped to Holland. His famous Discourse on Freethinking, which Swift made fun of, appeared in 1713. These men were not writers of a high genius, and their arguments were timid and often fallacious. But they bear for posterity the charm which is given by persecution, and they prepared the way for bolder and more scientific thinkers. Of their most distinguished opponents we shall speak in the next chapter.

CHAPTER VI

DEFOE AND THE ESSAYISTS

WE proceed to enumerate in the present chapter those miscellaneous figures belonging to the Augustan era which have not been hitherto examined. The oldest of the writers who became greatly distinguished in the reign of Anne was Daniel Defoe (1661 ?-1731), whose baptismal name was Daniel Foe. He was a Londoner, the son of a Nonconformist butcher in the City. He was trained to be a dissenting minister, and was well educated, although, as his enemies never ceased to remind him, "this Man was no Scholar." At four-and-twenty he went into the hosiery business in Cornhill, and seven years later he had to fly from his creditors, owing £17,000. It is believed that he became a pamphleteer long before this, but his biographers have discovered no printed matter indubitably Defoe's earlier than 1691. From 1695 to 1699 he was accountant to the Commissioners of the Glass Duty, and was in prosperous circumstances. His first important tract, the first pamphlet in favour of a Standing Army, appeared in 1697, when its author was thirty-six ; Defoe became active in supporting William III.'s measures, and published in the king's interest his Essay on Projects (1698). Hitherto Defoe had been a pronounced dissenter, but in 1698 he printed an opportunist pamphlet on Occasional Conformity. All these exercises, however, amounted to little more than what we should now call journalism. Defoe's first distinct literary success was made

in 1701 with his satire in verse, the True-born Englishman, in which he ridiculed the popular suspicion of the Dutch in England. He tells us that 80,000 copies of this rough poem were sold in the streets, and the king honoured him for the first time, on this occasion, with an audience. The death of William (March 8, 1702) was a very serious blow to the prospects of his active servant of the pen.

Defoe hailed the advent of Queen Anne with several very poor poems; he was slow to learn that his talents were not those of a versifier. At the close of 1702 he returned to the safer paths of prose with a famous pamphlet, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, a satire upon the High Church Tories, whose extreme tone in private conversation it parodied with daring bluntness. Defoe ironically recommended that "whoever was found at a conventicle should be banished the nation, and the preacher be hanged," and his speech was so plain that while the Highfliers gasped for breath, the Dissenters, on their side, were too much frightened to see the irony. When the truth was perceived, Defoe was prosecuted, and tried in July 1703; he stood for three days in the pillory, but Pope was incorrect in saying that "earless on high stood unabashed Defoe." He was a popular favourite, and admiring crowds wreathed the instrument of his discomfort with garlands of flowers. To the "hieroglyphic state-machine" itself he now addressed a Hymn. His punishment in the pillory was succeeded by a long imprisonment in Newgate, and during this latter his tile-works at Tilbury, which were important to his livelihood, failed through his absence from business. He was set free by Harley in the summer of 1704. During his imprisonment he had written A Collection of Casualties and Disasters, a bold fancy picture of that famous storm which Addison alluded to in the Campaign, "such as of late o'er pale Britannia past." This was undoubtedly issued to a credulous public as veritable history. It was in prison, too, that he started his influential political newspaper, the Review, which continued to appear twice a week until February 1705, after which it was published three times a week.

After existing ten years, an extraordinary period for a newspaper in those days, the Review expired in June 1713.

Defoe's history after his release is a somewhat perplexing one. He openly pretended to be gagged, and to have promised to write no more polemic for seven years; but in reality he had undertaken an agency for the Government, and presently he went to Scotland, not, it is regretted, so entirely for patriotic purposes as he pretended. He had become, to put it plainly, a paid official spy and secret pamphleteer. He even used his debts as decoys, and as Professor Minto has said, "when he was despatched on secret missions, departed wiping his eyes at the hardship of having to flee from his creditors." The fall of Harley did not deprive Defoe of the Queen's favour; on the contrary, he was immediately sent to Edinburgh on another private errand. Into the history of Defoe's innumerable political writings, one of the vexed questions of bibliography, it is needless to go here. He was exceedingly plausible and adroit, but his personal chronicle, when exposed to the light, has a very unpleasing air of insincerity. He wished, doubtless, to be a patriot, but he could not resist the temptation, as he puts it, of bowing in the house of Rimmon; nor could he conquer his insatiable desire to govern by journalism, to be putting his oar daily and hourly into every species of public business. Among less ephemeral writings of the period may be mentioned The Apparition of Mrs. Veal (1706), afterwards constantly republished with a dreary work of divinity by Drelincourt (1595-1669), which the ghost of Mrs. Veal had recommended. This was, it is needless to say, a little piece of realistic romance. In 1709 Defoe printed his History of the Union, and in 1715-18 his Family Instructor, a solid didactic work which long enjoyed a great popularity.

Defoe was nearly sixty before he began the series of books which have given him the unique place he holds in English literature. Between 1719 and 1728 he composed with extraordinary vigour, rapidity, and fulness, at an age at which the strength of the most ardent writer is usually abated. His un