OF THE PLAGUE YEAR BEING OBSERVATIONS OR MEMORIALS OF THE MOST LAST GREAT VISITATION IN 1665 WRITTEN BY A CITIZEN WHO CONTINUED ALL THE WHILE IN LONDON BY DANIEL DEFOE WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HENRY MORLEY LL.D., PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE AT LONDON GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS BROADWAY, LUDGATE HILL NEW YORK: 9 LAFAYETTE PLACE 1884 25486e.2 INTRODUCTION. DANIEL DE FOE, son of James Foe, a respectable butcher, was born in the parish of St. Giles, Cripplegate, in the year 1661. He was four years old, therefore, in the Plague year, 1665. The son of James Foe was named Daniel after his grandfather, who in the time of Charles the First was a gentleman in Northamptonshire, and kept a pack of hounds. We may infer, if we please, from the nature of man, that the family fortunes then went to the dogs, and that the son James, with energy of character, turned country training to account in the supply of sheep and cattle to the London food-market. James Foe prospered and grew old, acquiring, by his good sense, honour and influence among the London Nonconformists. He intended to train his son Daniel as a Nonconformist minister, and sent him, when fourteen years old-a year after the death of Milton-to an academy at Newington Green, established for the training to such ministry. The Reverend Charles Morton was its animating spirit. Defoe always referred to him with gratitude. It is included among recollections of Charles Morton's influence upon young minds committed to his charge, that, by his method of teaching, the students were made masters of the English tongue, and more of them excelled in that particular than of any school at that time." He also trained his boys to reflection upon current politics, that they might not enter blindly in after-life into controversies of their day. Defoe, almost alone in his time, brought the historic sense into political discussion. He also reformed the currency of English speech, which in his time had been lowered in value by a French alloy. We may join Defoe, therefore, in kindly recollection of a teacher who gave the right directing touch to his young mind. 66 After about five years' study at Newington Green, Daniel Foe was not called to the ministry, but entered into training for the business of a hose-factor in the City of London. That would be about the time of the great controversy touching the exclusion of the King's brother, the Duke of York, from succession to the throne, because he avowed himself to be a Roman Catholic. On the 25th of June 1680, when Foe's age was nineteen, the Earl of Shaftesbury presented the Duke of York to the Grand Jury of Westminster as a Popish Recusant. Out of this controversy came, in November 1681, Dryden's "Absalom and Achitophel," and the whole intellectual battle that had at its centre the best poem of the best poet of that day, and had the English Revolution among issues of the strife, was quickening the energies within young Foe's mind when his age was twenty. Much of the worth of a man's future work depends upon the lessons taught him in the school of life when youth is passing into manhood, with perception quick, |