Mr. Morton, or the elder Mr. Foe, would have sanctioned it; but the Presbyterian ministry was no longer, as it once had been, the youth's destination. He seems to have desired a more active sphere, and he was put to the business of commerce. His precise employment has been questioned, but when his libellers in later life called him a hosier, he said he had never been apprentice to that craft, though he had been a trader in it; and it is tolerably certain that, in seven years from the present date, he had a large agency in Freeman's-court, Cornhill, as a kind of middleman between the manufacturer and the retail trader. He was a freeman of London by his birth; on embarking in this business of hose-factor, he entered the livery; and he wrote his name in the Chamberlain's book, "Daniel Foe."

Seven eventful years! Trade could not so absorb him, but that he watched them with eager interest. Nor was it possible for such a man to watch them without hope. Hope would brighten in that sensible manly heart, when it most deserted weaker men's. When the King, alarmed, flung off his lounging sloth for crueller enjoyments; when lampoons and ballads of the streets, directed against the doings in Whitehall, became fiercer and bolder than even Duchess Portsmouth's impudence; when such serious work was afoot, that a satire by Dryden counted more at Court than an indecency by Rochester; when bills to exclude a Popish succession were only lost in the upper House by means of a phalanx of Protestant bishops, and the lower House that had passed them, rudely dissolved by a furious monarch and intemperately assailed by servile churchmen, was calmly defended by a Sydney and a Somers; when, the legitimate field of honest warfare being closed, dark conspiracies and treasons took its place, and the daring boast of Shaftesbury passed recklessly from mouth to mouth, that he'd walk the King leisurely out of his dominions, and make the Duke of York a vagabond on the earth like Cain ;-no fear was likely to depress, and no bragging was needed to keep in

hope, this clear, shrewd intellect. The young Cornhill merchant told his countrymen afterwards, how it had gone with him then. How Tyranny had taught him the value of liberty, Popery the danger of passive pulpits, and Oppression how to prize the fence of laws; with what interest he had observed the sudden visit of the King's nephew, William of Orange, already the hero of the Protestant liberties of Europe, and lately wedded to the presumptive heiress of the throne; of what light esteem he held the monarch's disregard of that kinsman's prudent counsel; and with what generous anger, yet unshrinking spirit, he saw the men who could not answer Algernon Sydney's book, erect a scaffold to take off his head.

own.

1

That was his first brave impulse to authorship of his In the year made infamous by the judicial murders of Russell and Sydney, he published his first political essay. It was a prose lampoon on High Church absurdities; and, with much that would not bear present revival, it bore the stamp of a robust new mind, fresh from the reading of Rabelais. It stirred the veteran libeller L'Estrange, and pamphlet followed pamphlet. But it needs not to touch the controversy now. It is dead and gone. Oxford herself repudiates, with shame, the decree she passed in full Convocation on the day of Russell's execution; promulgating, on pain of infamy here and damnation hereafter, the doctrines of divine right and passive obedience; and anathematizing twenty-seven propositions from Milton, Baxter, and Godwin, Bellarmine, Buchanan, and Hobbes, as seditious, scandalous, impious, blasphemous, heretical, and damnable.

Having fleshed his maiden pen, the young merchant soon resumed it, in a cause again involving religious liberty; with a spirit in advance of his party; and with force, decision, and success. The reign of Charles was now setting, in a sullen, dire persecution. Chapels were

1 The allusion in the text is to the Speculum Crapegounorum; but since this Essay was written I have seen

reason to doubt whether De Foe was really the author.

shut; ministers dying in jail; congregations scattered. A man who would not take the sacrament, was whipped or pilloried; a man who would not take it kneeling, was plundered or imprisoned. "See there!" cried the sharp strong sense of Daniel Foe, whom business had taken to Windsor, where he had sauntered into St. George's Chapel with a friend-" See that altar-piece! Our "Saviour administers his Last Supper to his disciples sitting round the table; and, because we would copy "that posture, the Government oppresses us." Almost as he spoke, the end was approaching. Evelyn had seen the King on the past Sunday evening, sitting and toying with his concubines, Portsmouth, Cleveland, and Mazarine. A French boy sang love-songs in a glorious gallery; and, round a table groaning with a bank of two thousand golden pieces, a crew of profligate courtiers drank and gambled. "Six days after, all was in the dust;" and caps in the air for James the Second.

Of the new monarch's greetings, the most grovelling James IL were those of the churchmen and the lawyers. The 1685-1689. Bishop of Chester preached the divinity and infallibility of Kings: the Temple benchers and barristers went to Court with the assurance that high prerogative, in its fullest extent, was the subject's best security for liberty and property; and in every pulpit thanksgivings resounded. In the first months of the reign, our hose-factor of Freeman's Yard heard it publicly preached from one of these pulpits, that if the King commanded the subject's head, and sent his messengers to fetch it, the subject was bound to submit, and, as far as possible, facilitate his own decapitation. Close upon this, came the sudden tidings of Monmouth's ill-fated landing; and, of a small band of daring citizens who took horse and joined him, Daniel Foe was one. Perhaps he thought his own head nearer danger than it was, and worth a stroke for safety. He knew, at any rate, only the better sides of Monmouth's character. He admired his popular manners. "None so beautiful,

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so brave as Absolon." He had seen him among the people in their sports, at races and at games, and thought his bearing sensible and manly. What matter if Lucy Walters was his mother? He knew him to be a sincere Protestant, and a lover of civil freedom; and he remembered the more kindly his disgrace in the reign just passed, for having vainly striven to moderate Episcopal cruelties in Scotland, when he saw the first Scottish act of the reign just begun, in a law to inflict death on conventicle preachers. In a word, our incipient rebel made no nice balance of danger and success; he saw what seemed to him liberty on the one side, and slavery on the other, and he resolved, with whatever fortune, to strike a blow for the good cause. He mounted horse and joined the invaders; was with them in Bristol and at Bath; and very narrowly escaped the crash that followed.

There is little doubt that while Bishops Turner and Ken were prolonging Monmouth's agonies on the scaffold, for the chance of a declaration in favour of divine right and non-resistance; and while Jeffreys's bloody campaign, through the scenes of the late rebellion, was consigning his master and himself to eternal infamy; the young rebel citizen had effected a passage over seas. At about this time, he certainly was absent from England; as certainly had embarked some capital in the Spanish and Portuguese trade; and no one has questioned his narrow escape from the clutch of Jeffreys. The mere escape had been enough for other men ;-his practical, unwearying, versatile energy, made it the means of new adventure, the source of a larger experience, the incentive to a more active life. He had seen Spain, Germany, and France, before he again saw Freeman's-court, Cornhill; and, when he returned, it was with the name he has made immortal. He was now Daniel De Foe.

Whether the change was a piece of innocent vanity picked up in his travels, or had any more serious motive, it would now be idle to inquire. By both names he was known to the last; but his books, in

almost every instance, bore that by which he is known to posterity.

He found a strange scene in progress on his return. The power of the King to dispense with the laws, had been affirmed by eleven out of the twelve judges; and he saw this monstrous power employed to stay the as monstrous persecution of Nonconformists and Dissenters. A licence purchased for fifty shillings had opened the prison doors of Richard Baxter; but the sturdy lovers of freedom who purchased that licence, acknowledged, in the act of doing it, that they placed the King above the laws. It was a state of things in which men of the clearest sight had lost their way, and the steadiest were daily stumbling. William Penn had gone up to Court with a deputation of thanks; he was seconded by not a few Presbyterians; he had the support of all those classes of Dissent whose idea of religion rejected altogether the alliance of civil government, conceiving itself to stand immeasurably above such control; and, though the main Presbyterian body stood aloof, it was in an attitude of deference and fear, without dignity, without self-reliance. For a while De Foe looked on in silence; and then resolvedly took his course.

Of James II's sincerity there is as little doubt, as of his bigotry and meanness. He had the obstinate weakness of his father. "There goes an honest gentleman," said the Archbishop of Rheims, some year or two later, "who lost three kingdoms for a mass." His unwearied, sole endeavour, from the hour when he ascended the throne to that in which he was hurled from it, was to establish the Roman Catholic religion in England. When the Church, that had declared resistance unchristian and proffered him unconditional obedience, refused him a single benefice fat or lean, and kept his hungering Popish doctors outside the butteries of her Oxford colleges,the Dissenters became his hope. If he could array Dissent against the Church, there was an entrance yet for Rome. That was his passion. He had literally no other; and, to balance or counteract it, he had neither breadth of