illustrate that period. for some piece of junketting even in the midst of his alarm, whereas Defoe thinks of his property only, when he has time to think of anything but the plague. But they are at bottom the same. While, however, this central figure remains the characteristic but not elevated personage with whom we are already acquainted, the history which he records is done with a tragic force and completeness which it is impossible to surpass. In this there is nothing commonplace, no wearying monotony. The very statistics have a tragic solemnity in them, the awful unseen presence dominates everything. We scarcely breathe while we move about the streets emptied of all passers-by, or with a suspicious line of pedestrians in the middle of the way, keeping as far apart as possible from the houses. This is not mere prose, it is poetry in its most rare form; it is an ideal representation, in all its sober details, of one of the most tragical moments of human suffering and fate.

Pepys would have found means

Nothing else that Defoe has done is on the same level; it was pitched on too high a key perhaps for the multitude. His innocent thief, Colonel Jack, begins with a picture, both amusing and touching, of the curious moral denseness and confusion of a street boy; his Cavalier is a charming young man, but both of these, and all the rest of Defoe's heroes and heroines, grow heavy and tedious at the end. The Journal of the Plague is not like this. The conclusion, the sudden surprise and half-delirious sense of relief, the joy which makes the passers-by stop and shake hands with each other in the streets, and the women call out from their

ance comes.

windows with tears and outcries of gladness, is sudden and overwhelming as the reality. We are caught in the growing despair, and suddenly in a moment deliverHere alone Defoe is not too long: the unexpected is brought in with a skill and force not less remarkable than that which, in the previous pages, has portrayed the slow growth and inevitable development of the misery. Up to this anti-climax of unlooked-for joy, the calamity has grown, every new touch intensifying the awful reality. But the recovery is sudden, and told without an unnecessary word. It is the only

instance in which Defoe has followed the instinct of a great artist and shown that he knew how to avail himself of the unwritten code and infallible methods of art.

We forget his shortcomings when we discuss this, which is to our minds much his greatest work, and it is well that we should leave him in this disposition. He died mysteriously alone, after a period of wandering and hiding which nobody can explain. Whether he was in trouble with creditors or with political enemies, or with the exasperated party which he had managed to outwit; whether he kept out of the way that his family might make better terms for themselves, or that he might keep the remains of his money out of the hands of an undutiful son, or a grasping son-in-law; nobody can tell. He died in remote lodgings all alone, and his affairs were administered by a stranger, perhaps his landlady; no one knows. His domestic circumstances have been referred to during his life only in the vaguest way, He had a wife and a numerous family when he was put in the pillory. He had a wife, a son who was

unkind, and three daughters at the end, but that is all we know. He died at seventy-two of a lethargy,' no doubt fallen into the feebleness and hopelessness of lonely old age. His life overflowed with activity and business; to be doing seems to have been a necessity of his being; but he never enjoyed the importance due to his powers, and in an age when men of letters filled the highest posts never would appear to have risen above his citizen circle, his shopkeeping ways. Something in the man must have accounted for this, but it is difficult to say what it was; for the age did not require a high standard of truthfulness, and the worst of his misdoings were kept secret from the public. Perhaps his manners were not such as society, though very easy in those days, could tolerate; but this is simple guesswork. All we know of Defoe is that, as a writer, he was of the greatest influence and note, but as a man, nothing. He died, poor and alone; he had little reward for unexampled labour. When Addison was Secretary of State, and Prior an ambassador, he was nobody-a sword in the hand of an unscrupulous statesman-a shopkeeper, manufacturing his genius and selling it by the yard. A sadder conclusion never was

told.

THE HUMOURIST

THERE is not a name in the entire range of English literature to which so full and universal appreciation has been given by posterity as that of Addison. He had his critics in his day. He had, indeed, more than critics; and from one quarter at least has received in his breast the finest and sharpest sting with which a friend estranged could point poetic vengeance. But the burden even of contemporary voices was always overwhelmingly in his favour; and nowadays there is no one in the world, we believe, that has other than gentle words for the gentle writer, the finest critic, the finest gentleman, the most tender humourist of his age. It is not only admiration but a sort of personal affection with which we look back, detecting in all the bustling companies of that witty and depraved period his genial figure, with a delightful simplicity in the midst of the formalism, and whole-heartedness among the conceits and pretensions of the fops and wits, the intriguing statesmen and busy conspirators of an age in which public faith can scarcely be said to have existed at all. He had his little defects, which were the defects of the time. And perhaps his England would not have loved him as it did had he been entirely without a