DANIEL DE FOE.

The Novels and Miscellaneous Works of DANIEL DE FOE; with a Biographical Memoir of the Author. 20 vols. 12mo. Oxford: 1842. The Works of DANIEL DE FOE. 3 vols. royal 8vo. London: 1843.

I.

CHARLES THE SECOND.

1661-1685.

SWIFT proposed, for one of the sour consolations of his Irish exile, to compile a catalogue of Things that Ought to have Succeeded. A modern version of the sorry list would be incomplete without the "Complete" Editions of De Foe. Better undertakings have never more decisively. failed. Of the only two attempts, now before us, made with any sort of pretension to success, the first scantly executed a limited design, and the second abruptly stopped with four-fifths of its labour unaccomplished. Such as they are, the intelligent bookseller offers them for something less than a fourth of

their original cost, and has yet to complain that his customers turn away. He would fain think better of the writer with whom his boyhood associates the first and most enduring delight he has received from literature; and perhaps he moves him with some reluctance from that popular shelf which holds the Pope, the Swift, and the Addison.

It is with De Foe dead, as it was with De Foe living. He stands apart from the circle of the reigning wits of his time, and his name is not called over with theirs. What in this respect was formerly the fashion, is the fashion still; and whether sought for in the Histories of Doctor Smollett or of Lord Mahon, his niche is vacant. His life, to be fairly presented, should be written as the "Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Daniel De Foe, who lived above Seventy Years all Alone, in the Island of Great Britain." It might then be expected to compare, in vicissitude and interest, with his immortal romance; as written hitherto, it has only shared the fate of his manly but perishable polemics.

He was born much about the time of that year of grace, 1661, when Mr. Pepys and his wife, walking in Whitehall Gardens, saw "the finest smocks and linen petticoats of my Lady Castlemaine, laced with rich lace at the bottom," that ever they saw: "and did me good to look at them,” adds the worthy man. There was little

1685.]

BLESSINGS OF THE RESTORATION.

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else in those days to do any body good. The people, drunk with the orgies of the Restoration, rejoiced in nothing so much as in pimps and courtesans; and to be a bad Englishman and a worse Christian, was to be a good Protestant and a loyal subject. Sheldon governed the Church, and Clarendon the State; the Bishop having no better charity than to bring Presbyterian preachers into contempt, and the Chancellor no better wisdom than to reduce them to beggary. While Sheldon entertained his dinner-table with caricatures of a dissenting minister's sermon, "till," says one of his guests, "it made us all burst," Clarendon was drawing up that Act of Uniformity, by which, in one day, he threw out three thousand ministers from the benefices they held.

This was in 1662; and the beginning of that system of religious persecution, under which, with God's blessing, the better part of the English character reawakened, and the hardy virtues of Dissent struck root and flourished. Up to this time, vast numbers of the Presbyterians, strongly attached to Monarchy, desired but a reasonable settlement of Episcopacy, and would have given in their adherence to any moderate system. The hope of such a compromise was now rudely closed. In 1663 the Conventicle Act was passed, punishing with transportation a third offence of attendance on any wor

ship but that of the Church; and while the plague was raging, two years after, the Oxford Act banished five miles from any corporate town all who should refuse a certain oath, which no Nonconformist could honestly take. Secret, stealthy worship was the resource left; and other things throve in secret with it, which would less have prospered openly. Substantial citizens, wealthy tradesmen, even gossiping Secretaries to the Admiralty, began to find other employment than the criticism of Lady Castlemaine's lace, or admiration of Mistress Nell Gwynne's linen. It appeared to be dawning on them at last, that they were really living in the midst of infamy and baseness; that buffoons and courtesans were their Rulers; that defeat and disgrace were their Portion; that a Dutch fleet was riding in their Channel, and a perjured and pensioned Popish despot sitting on their Throne.

The indulgence granted to Dissenters in the year of the Dutch war (the previous year had been one of fierce persecution), opened, among other meeting-houses, that of Little St. Helen's, Bishopsgate; where the Rev. Dr. Annesley, ejected from his living of Cripplegate by the Act of Uniformity, administered his pious lessons. Under him there sate, in that congregation of earnest listeners, the family of a wealthy butcher of St. Giles's, Cripplegate, Mr. James Foe; and the worthy minister