own pride by being fair to him; they rather gratify it in the very act of praising, which at that period is a sort of assumption of equality, if not of superiority.

To the truly great man, however, human praise or blame is of small value. He knows its worthlessness, and looks to a higher Judge. He runs his course steadily, although no hand is raised for him-although all hands are raised against him; and when it is over, he goes calmly to his rest. To him it matters little if the earth resounds with praises or reproaches-for there is another and a better world.

This truth is illustrated in the life of the extraordinary man whose name heads this paper. He pursued an honest and manful course; he was hated, and persecuted, and wronged in every way by his contemporaries; but posterity have done him justice, and there are few hearts now that refuse respect, if not reverence, to his name. But the general public do not know how many claims he has on their esteem. They associate his name with his Family Instructor,' Religious Courtship,' Memoirs of the Plague,' and, above all, Robinson Crusoe.' But all these were works of his old age. His chief labours were as a politician and Nonconformist; and he was a sufferer in the cause of religious liberty. The fact is, that De Foe had no biographer worth notice till more than fifty years after his death. Since then several memoirs of him have seen the light; but scarcely any of them deserve to see light any longer. They lack the animation and reality, which their subject demands. The energetic hero of them shows calm and passive under treatment. They are as lifeless as he is. The best is that by Mr.Wilson, whose elaborate and painful work will always be the standard for future biographers; but it is written with a diffusiveness of style not calculated to lure those who begin it, to the end.

This is so opposed to what should be the case, that we think it well to present a brief account of his life and opinions, touching chiefly on his career as a politician and Nonconformist.

To go no further back in his pedigree, his father was a butcher in Cripplegate, where Daniel was born in 1661. His parents were Independent Dissenters; their minister Dr. Annesley, was once rector of Cripplegate, but, having seceded from the Establishment, preached in St. Helen's, Bishopsgate.

Under such care, he was brought up in the strictest rules of the Dissenters of those times. The sect was then comparatively small, for it was dangerous to belong to it; and true piety had then, as it would have now, under similar circumstances, but few votaries. As Lord Bacon says of virtue, we may say of religion— it is like precious odours, most fragrant when they are incensed or crushed.

Of his early years we know little. They were overshadowed, we know, by one cloud-the Great Plague. He was in London all the while it raged; his father judging that his family was as safe there as anywhere else, if it were God's pleasure they should be preserved. The scenes he then saw, and constantly heard of, remained, though he was very young at that time, indelibly impressed upon his mind, but he did not write about them till many years after.

In 1675, at the age of fourteen, he was put to Mr. Morton's academy, or college, in Newington, where, he afterwards says, the pupils had one advantage over those in the established universities; namely, that while, in the latter, the tutors were careful about the dead tongues, and had all their readings in Latin and Greek-in this one, the tutors gave all their lectures and systems, whether of philosophy or divinity, in English; by which, of course, great advantages were gained. For, as he says, it seems absurd to the last degree that preaching the gospel, which was the end of their studies, being in English, the time should be spent in the language which it is to be fetched from, and none in the language it is to be delivered in. And to this error he humorously attributed it that many learned, and otherwise excellent, ministers preached away their hearers; while jingling, noisy boys, with a good stock in their faces and a dysentery of the tongue, though little or nothing in their heads, ran away with the whole town.

The languages, however, were not neglected. He learned Latin and Greek, Italian and French. He also appears to have acquired a good stock of mathematics, geography, logic, and the like; although the bent of all his studies was primarily towards the office of the ministry.

He

But it was not intended that this should be his career. was to preach from the press, and not from the pulpit. He was solemnly set apart to the clerical profession; but in the impatience of no common genius, he so mixed himself with political controversies, sharp-witted discussions, and secular matters, that it was found necessary, as time drew on, to withdraw him from this employment.

Two years afterwards, he began authorship; and it appears that his worthy parents got over his disgrace at college on learning that he was likely to become of some note and use as a defender of Nonconformity, and in the troubled atmosphere of politics. It seems to us as if he never lost sight of his original destination, though he left the regular road to itwe mean preaching; but that, in the majority of his writings, he was constantly aiming at the spread and growth of true and unfettered religion.

Among his earliest pamphlets was one which has not descended to us, but being on a subject nearly akin to certain recent transactions on the continent, we may notice it here. The Emperor of Austria had goaded the Hungarians into rebellion. These poor people were Protestants, and the Emperor a Papist, which made matters worse. They appealed for aid to neighbouring Protestant countries, but without success. On this they called in the Turks, who were then a brave nation, and with them they pressed the Emperor so hard, laying siege to Vienna, that Sobieski, King of Poland, fearing lest the Mahommedans should get footing in the very heart of Europe, raised a large body of troops, horse and foot; and, suddenly coming on the Turks, defeated them with great slaughter. The question in England was, whether it was right to help the Papist emperor, who had dealt very unmercifully with his Protestant subjects, and many said, no; but De Foe thought, that their calling in the Turks quite overbalanced the scale against the Hungarians-it not being the interest of the Protestant religion to have even Popery itself thus extirpated. In fact, he said, he had rather the Emperor should tyrannize than the Turks. For the Papist hates me because he thinks me an enemy to Christ and his church; but the Turk hates me because he hates the name of Christ, bids him defiance as a Saviour, and declares universal war against his very name.'

This was the first time he differed from his friends in politics, many being much offended with him, for which he expressed his sorrow; but, having carefully examined his opinions, he would not suppress them when he believed them to be true. This was one of the noblest traits in his character. He was a sincere man. He began life by boldly avowing what, after mature consideration, he believed to be the truth; and he continued to do so in spite of persecution, and loss of friendships, and of money. No sleek, variable man, he-bending and yielding to the opinions of others, either from courtesy or fear. He feared nothing but his Conscience: that was the only critic who could make him afraid. Unlike the great body of his contemporaries-unlike the great body of our contemporaries, too-he thought for himself; he ascertained the truth for himself; and then he would not hide it, but proclaimed it on every side, although dungeons, and pillories, and fines, as well as arguments, were brought against him.

In 1685, Charles II. died, leaving the nation in a truly pitiable state. Morality, honesty, religion, and all other virtues, were not only neglected, but ridiculed in every way. Such things could not be suffered in another reign. Divine right was a straw to prop such a fabric; and though James II. came

to the throne with fair promises, it was no sooner known that any amendments were proposed with a view to the establishment of Popery, than the whole body of Protestants in the nation determined to make a stand against him.

Their first efforts failed. With a number of others, mostly Dissenters (for the revenues of the Church not having been as yet fingered, that body only looked on), De Foe joined Monmouth when he landed in June, 1685. The expedition was badly managed: had it been otherwise, he states that it must have succeeded, for half the Dorsetshire nobility would have joined the Duke but for his ill-timed proclamation of himself as king, and the denunciation of Albemarle and Faversham as traitors. These and other follies worked against them; and on Sedge-Moor the army was scattered by James's forces, and Monmouth was afterwards taken. De Foe did not wait for the issue, but escaped to London, where he managed so well as not even to be suspected of a share in that business; nor would it have been known at all, if he had not himself divulged it years after.

This event, however, made him seriously consider whether he was not losing his time by thus mixing in the battles of politics, which he could neither direct nor allay. He was recommended to a respectable manufacturer, then in want of a London agent ; and, after a struggle, he was persuaded to lay politics partly aside, and commence as a broker. His offices were in Freeman's Yard, Cornhill, where Royal Exchange Buildings now stand.

But he did not take kindly to trade. It was solemn drudgery to him; and he hankered after politics and adventure, just as a jockey turned ploughman would hanker after the chase when he saw his field alive with hunters in full course. Accordingly, he took a very early opportunity to join once more in controversy; and when James, to encourage the Papists, proposed the free toleration of Dissenters, he wrote a pamphlet to caution his fellow-Nonconformists against accepting such a gift, not granted by parliament, but by the royal dispensation alone. It was plain, he said, that it was wholly inconsistent with the constitution, and done only to create a feud between the Dissenters and the Church, that the Papists might find a weak and divided camp, and so get the day. Here, again, he offended some of his friends, who told him that he was a young man, and did not understand the Dissenters' interests, but was doing them harm instead of good; to which, when time undeceived them, he only returned the words of that young man to Job, for which God never reproved him-Great men are not always wise, nor do the aged understand judgment.' In fact, though he had said, he had

rather the Popish Austrians should ruin the Protestant Hungarians than that the Infidel House of Ottoman should ruin both Protestant and Papist in Germany, yet he would rather have the Church of England pull the Dissenters' clothes off by fines and forfeitures than that the Papists should fall both on Church and Dissenters and pull their skins off by fire and faggot.

This was a strange time in our ecclesiastical history. The Nonconformists held the real balance of power, and, had they joined with King James, the Prince of Orange might as well have stayed in Holland. But they would not do this. The Church had cruelly plundered them, yet they chose rather to be under a Protestant than a Papal governor, and so saved the Church of England from her enemies.

De Foe's account of the conduct of that Church in her straits, is very amusing. The clergy, he says, became the very opposite of what they had been, and were the foremost to cry up peace and union, pressing the Dissenters to forget unkindnesses, and come into a general league against the danger that threatened them; and they were their brethren, the Dissenters,' and 'their brethren that differed from them in some things,' now that it was evident if the Nonconformists joined Rome they would be undone. To these sudden friends, however, the Dissenters paid little or no heed; they preferred their tyranny to Papal tyranny, and therefore did not intend to side with Rome, which, when they found, the Church party took courage, and the crisis of our history arrived.

James had grown proud, in consequence of his success against Monmouth, and pushed his prerogative far beyond its rightful limits. Mass-worship was openly practised in many places, and the offices of trust and high pay were filled with priests. The Protestant feeling of the nation would bear no more, and proposals were made to William of Orange, who landed at Torbay on the 4th November, 1688. De Foe regrets, in one of his tracts, that he could not leave his business so long as to go there to meet him, but he joined the march at Henley.

It seemed as if the whole people of England had, with one consent, risen for their deliverance. Where they could they joined William; where they could not do that they assembled under the gentlemen and nobility, and drew together in great bodies at York, Nottingham, and elsewhere. The enthusiasm was so great that a sudden terror fell on the enemy's camp, and when the people looked for at least a battle, the whole Popish pack had vanished, like spectres at cockcrowing.

De Foe tells many tales of this excited time; how poor James parted with his dignity, and courage, and crown alto