By a truly realistic touch De Foe's contemplative saddler closes his journal with "a coarse but sincere stanza of my own,"
A dreadful plague in London was
In the year sixty-five,
Which swept an hundred thousand souls
Away; yet I alive!
The modern reader finds that De Foe's fictions are too like facts, and, often, in the moral and religious reflections, too like tracts, for his taste. On the other hand, to a contemplative mind, "Robinson Crusoe," carefully read, and compared with its descendants in fiction, is a source of delight. De Foe, at the age of 60, must have been, while he wrote it, as happy as his innumerable readers. For example, we compare Robinson's felling of a cedar tree "five feet ten inches diameter at the lower part..." and his construction of a vessel "fit to carry twenty-six men," a vessel quite unlaunchable, with the practicable coracle, the most "home-made" of things in "Treasure Island". We compare the trial trips of the two crafts (Robinson's second boat); we see that R. L. Stevenson has produced the less impossible narrative of the twain, and that both rejoice the heart.
The mass, and the variety, of what must be called the "pot-boilers" of De Foe are unequalled. In better conditions of authorship he would have been a rich man, but he died poor, in distress, and under a cloud, in 1731.
A history of literature is not necessarily a history of philosophical, metaphysical, and theological speculation. In such speculation the age was rich that saw the volcanic eruption of sects and heresies during the religious frenzy of the Civil War, and also beheld the reaction from all "enthusiasm" to the passion for common sense and for science as "organized common sense" which came in with the Restoration. Hobbes's works did not encourage religious "enthusiasm," or mysticism, or belief in the ineffable spiritual experiences of devout men, from John Bunyan with his visions, to Ralph Cudworth (1617-1688), an Anglican divine, with his Neoplatonic hints at Union with the Absolute ("True Intellectual System of the Universe," "Eternal and Immutable Morality"). The learned and the unlearned wrote books on either side, sceptical or in favour of belief.
The Royal Society impartially included Joseph Glanvill (16361680) with his "Vanity of Dogmatising," and his "Sadducismus Triumphatus," the pioneer of Psychical Research, with its tales of Poltergeists, wraiths, and levitations, some of them fairly well authenticated. The Royal Society also gave a place to the far more famous philosopher of liberal common sense philosophy, John Locke (1632-1704). Locke's first eighteen years were passed under the shadow of the Great Rebellion, and at Christ Church, Oxford, under a Head who was an Independent divine. He did not like the new freedom, in which he found the old slavery, but after the Restoration he found liberty for discussion, in which "enthusiasm" was not permitted to enter. His attitude towards mental philosophy was not unlike that of Bacon. He disliked Aristotelianism as then held at Oxford, thinking that words usurped the place of facts, and in his "Essay on the Human Understanding" he employed that plain style which the Royal Society enjoined. The work was written at intervals during seventeen years, disturbed when as a friend of Shaftesbury, Dryden's Achitophel, the turbulent patron of Titus Oates, he was sent into exile. The burden of the essay, which appeared in 1690, is opposition to the theory of "innate ideas"—the terms need defining—and insistence that we derive our ideas from the presentations of our senses. "Average common sense was always kept in his view," and "he wrote for the most part in the language of the market-place". He wanted man to think as a human being very limited in his faculties, "to distinguish between what is, and what is not comprehensible by us," and his treatise had the most potent and enduring effects on continental as well as on English Philosophy. He was a friend of his junior, Berkeley, whose philosophic fancy took a wider and more audacious range. His "Treatise on Government" and "Thoughts on Education" followed rapidly. He obtained a place as Commissioner of Trade and Plantations (Colonies), and advised England to anticipate Scotland in founding an emporium at Darien, in Spanish territory, as the Scots were to discover.
We have not space for much more than the names of other prose writers of this great age. John Arbuthnot (1667-1735), a Scot in London, was an admirable humorist, a great physician, and the friend of all the wits; himself a good-humoured Swift in prose satire. Bishop Atterbury (1662-1732) excited an enthusiastic devotion in Pope, who proposed to accompany this clerical conspirator into exile, after his great Jacobite plot was crushed in 1723. Atterbury was an accomplished general writer, while the great scholar and Master of Trinity, Richard Bentley (1662-1742), gave to his classical criticism of the forged "Epistles of Phalaris" the merit of vigorous literature. His conjectural various readings in Milton's text are now and then comical, and seem a parody of classical criticism. The Viscount Bolingbroke, Henry St. John (1678-1751), was a wit among politicians, the patron, friend, and inspiration of the wits; he had his fame as an eloquent rhetorician in his life, and as a daring thinker, but he really wrote best when he wrote simply and humorously, as in his satire of his Jacobite allies, "The Epistle to Windham" (1716). His "Ideal of a Patriot King" also preserves his literary reputation (1738). Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), was an elegant philosopher, a thinker of taste; while George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne (born at Kilkenny 1685, died 1753), was an idealistic philosopher and man of science ("The Theory of Vision") whose style, in grace and irony, is akin to the manners of Plato and of Pascal. The best and most delightful of his works is the dialogue "Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher," directed against the Sceptics, and deistical writers. Berkeley's character was not less admirable than his works.