understanding nor warmth of heart. It stood him in the stead, therefore, of every other faith or feeling; and, when the game went wholly against him, he had no better source of courage. He thought but of " raising the Host," and winning it that way.

De Foe understood both the game and the gambler. We could name no man of the time who understood them so clearly as this young trader of Cornhill. He saw the false position of all parties; the blundering clash of interests, the wily complications of policy. He spoke with contempt of a Church that, with its "fawning, "whining, canting sermons," had played the Judas to its Sovereign. He condemned the address-making Dissenters, who, in their zeal for religious liberty, had forgotten civil freedom. He exposed the conduct of the King, as, in plain words, a fraudulent scheme "to "create a feud between Dissenters and the Establishment, and so destroy both in the end." And with emphatic eloquence he exhorted the Presbyterian party, that now, if ever, they should make just and reasonable terms with the Church; that now, if ever, should her assumption of superiority, her disdain of equal intercourse, her denial of Christian brotherhood, be effectually rebuked; that between the devil sick and the devil well, there was a monstrous difference; and that, failing any present assertion of rights and guarantees, it would be hopeless to expect them when she should have risen, once more strengthened, from her humble diet and her recumbent posture.

The advice and the warning were put forth in two masterly publications. The Dissenters condemned them, and took every occasion to disclaim their author. De Foe had looked for no less. In his twenty-sixth year, he found himself that solitary, resolute, independent thinker, which, up to his seventieth year, he remained. What he calls the "grave, weak, good men" of the party, did not fail to tell him of his youth and inexperience; but, for all that fell out, he had prepared himself abundantly. "He

“that will serve men, must not promise himself that he "shall not anger them. I have been exercised in this usage " even from a youth. I had their reproaches when I blamed "their credulity and confidence in the flatteries and ca"resses of Popery; and when I protested against addresses of thanks for an illegal liberty of conscience founded on "a dispensing power." He was thus early initiated in the transcendent art of thinking and standing ALONE.

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Whoso can do this manfully, will find himself least disposed to be alone, when any great good thing is in progress. De Foe would have worked with the meanest of the men opposed to him, in the business of the nation's deliverance. He knew that Dyckvelt was now in England, in communication with the leaders of both parties in the State. He had always honoured the steadypurposed Dutchman's master as the head of the league of the great European confederacy, which wanted only England to enable it to complete its noble designs. He believed it to be the duty of that prince, connected both by birth and marriage with the English throne, to watch the course of public affairs in a country which by even the natural course of succession he might be called to govern. But he despised the Tory attempt to mix up a claim of legitimacy with the greater principle of elective sovereignty; and he laughed with the hottest of the Jacobites at the miserable warming-pan plot. He felt, and was the first to state it in print at the time, that the title to the throne was but in another form the more sacred title of the people to their liberties; and so, when he heard of the landing at Torbay, he mounted his "rebel" horse once more. He was with the army of William when James precipitately fled; he was at the bar of the House of Lords when Hampden took up the vote of non-allegiance to a Popish sovereign, and when the memorable resolution of the 13th of February declared that no King had reigned in England since the day of James's flight; he heard William's first speech to the Houses five days later; and, "gallantly mounted and

William III.

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richly accoutred," he was foremost in the citizen troop of volunteer-horse, who were William and Mary's guard of honour at their first visit to Guildhall.'

De Foe never ceased to commemorate William's bearing in these passages of his life. While the Convention debates were in progress, the calmly resolute Stadtholder had stayed, secluded, at St. James's. Sycophants sought access to him, counsellors would have advised with him, in vain, He invited no popularity; he courted no party. The only Tory chief who spoke with him, came back to tell his friends that he set "little value on a crown." The strife, the heat, the violent animosity, the doubtful success all that in these celebrated debates seemed to affect his life and fortune-moved him not. He desired nothing to be concealed from him; but he said nothing to his informants. This only was known: he would not hold his crown by the apron-strings of his wife. He would not reign but as an independent sovereign. "They are "an inconstant people, Marshal," he quietly observed to Schomberg.

Here, then, in the prince who now ruled over England, 1689-1702. was a man who also could stand ALONE. Here was a king

for such a subject as De Foe. We may not wonder that the admiration conceived of him by the citizen merchant deepened into passion. He reverenced him, loved, and honoured him; and kept as a festival in his house, even to the close of his life, that great day in the month of November which is so remarkably associated with William's name. On that day, exclaimed De Foe with enthusiasm, he was born; on that day he married the daughter of England; on that day he rescued the nation from a bondage worse than that of Egypt, a bondage of soul as well as bodily servitude! Its first celebration was held at a country house in Tooting, which it would seem De Foe now occupied; and the manner of it afforded in itself some proof, of what we hardly need to be told, that the resolute, practical habits of this earnest, busy man, were not unattended by that genial warmth of nature which alone imparts strength of character such as his, and without which never public virtue, and rarely private, comes quite to its maturity. In this village, too, in this year of the Revolution, we find him occupied in erecting a meeting-house; in drawing together a Nonconformist congregation; and in providing a man of learning for their minister. It was an object always near his heart. For, every new foundation of that kind went some way towards the rendering Dissent a permanent separate interest, and an independent political body, in the State; and the Church's reviving heats made the task at once imperative and easy. Wherever intemperate language, and overbearing arrogant persecution, are characteristics of the highest churchmen, should we marvel that sincere church-goers turn affrighted from the flame they see incessantly flickering about those elevated rods, which they had innocently looked to for safe conductors?

But, in the midst of his labours and enjoyments, there came a stroke of evil fortune. He had married some little time before this (nothing further is known on that head, but that in the course of his life he had two wives, the first named Mary, and the second Susannah); and,

with the prospect of a family growing up around him, he saw his fortune swept suddenly away by a large unsuccessful adventure. One angry creditor took out a commission of bankruptcy; and De Foe, submitting meanwhile to the rest a proposition for amicable settlement, fled from London. A prison paid no debts, he said. "The cruelty of your laws against debtors, without dis"tinction of honest or dishonest, is the shame of your "nation. It is not he who cannot pay his debts, but he "who can and will, who must necessarily be a knave. He "who is unable to pay his debts at once, may yet be able "to pay them at leisure; and you should not meanwhile "murder him by law, for such is perpetual imprisonment." So, from himself to his fellow-men, he reasoned always. No wrong or wretchedness ever befell De Foe, which he did not with all diligence bestir himself to turn to the use and profit of his kind. To what he now struggled with, through two desperate years, they mainly owed, seven years later, that many most atrocious iniquities, prevailing in the bankrupt refuges of Whitefriars and the Mint, were repressed by statute;' and that the small relief of William's act was at last reluctantly vouchsafed. He had pressed the subject with all his power of plain strong sense, and with a kind of rugged impressiveness, as of the cry of a sufferer.

1 The extent of this service could only be measured for the reader by a description, for which this is no fitting place, of the atrocities and knaveries of every kind practised in those privileged haunts of desperate and outlawed men. Well warranted was the pride with which he remarked in his old age: "I had the good fortune," says he, to be the first that complained of this encroaching evil in "former days, and think myself not "too vain in saying that my humble "representations, in a day when I

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add, from another of his writings, an illustration of the "excesses" of dishonesty to which their facilities tempted men :- "Nothing was more "frequent than for a man in full "credit to buy all the goods he could "lay his hands on, and carry them "directly from the house he bought "them at into the Friars, and then "send for his creditors, and laugh at "them, insult them, showing them "their own goods untouched, offer "them a trifle in satisfaction, and if "they refused it, bid them defiance : "I cannot refrain vouching this of 'my own knowledge, since I have more than many times been served so myself."