CHAPTER V. THE ADVOCATE OF PEACE AND UNION 62
CHAPTER VI. DR. SACHEVERELL, AND THE CHANGE OF GOVERNMENT 73
CHAPTER VII. DIFFICULTIES IN RE-CHANGING SIDES 103
CHAPTER VIII. LATER JOURNALISTIC LABOURS 115
CHAPTER IX. THE PLACE OF DEFOE'S FICTIONS IN HIS LIFE 130
CHAPTER X. HIS MYSTERIOUS END 155
CHAPTER I.
DEFOE'S YOUTH AND EARLY PURSUITS.
The life of a man of letters is not as a rule eventful. It may be rich in spiritual experiences, but it seldom is rich in active adventure. We ask his biographer to tell us what were his habits of composition, how he talked, how he bore himself in the discharge of his duties to his family, his neighbors, and himself; what were his beliefs on the great questions that concern humanity. We desire to know what he said and wrote, not what he did beyond the study and the domestic or the social circle. The chief external facts in his career are the dates of the publication of his successive books.
Daniel Defoe is an exception to this rule. He was a man of action as well as a man of letters. The writing of the books which have given him immortality was little more than an accident in his career, a comparatively trifling and casual item in the total expenditure of his many-sided energy. He was nearly sixty when he wrote Robinson Crusoe. Before that event he had been a rebel, a merchant, a manufacturer, a writer of popular satires in verse, a bankrupt; had acted as secretary to a public commission, been employed in secret services by five successive Administrations, written innumerable pamphlets, and edited more than one newspaper. He had led, in fact, as adventurous a life as any of his own heroes, and had met quickly succeeding difficulties with equally ready and fertile ingenuity.