editions of "Paradise Lost" before Milton received the stamp of fashion. But we come now to a period when the Popular Influence, always active upon the best minds, becomes with every generation more and more dominant over the small minds too. For the people at large extend their reading power into departments of knowledge formerly unsought by them, and their favour is found generally to be more remunerative than that of the most princely patron. This period should date from the day when Defoe stood in the pillory. Defoe's service of the people. Daniel Defoe, a tradesman's son, born in the reign of Charles II., bred to Dissent, educated by a schoolmaster who did not account the political movements of his time an unfit study for English boys, was, even as a young hose-factor on Cornhill, zealous in the true cause of the English people. Though a Protestant in fierce anti-Popery days, he had no part in the passionate extravagance of a sectarian hatred to the Roman Catholics. But their principles, honestly carried out, were by their nature subversive of liberty of conscience. It happened that civil and religious liberty were in his time, from like causes, in equal danger; but, although a Dissenter, he could fight their battle only on the highest ground, as that of the English people, and not of the Nonconformists only. So it was that he fought, dissociated from the lesser passions of the hour, without one personal adherent. When James II. laboured openly and insidiously, by assumption of a personal supremacy over the laws, to give the Pope his own again in England, the Act of Toleration, by which he released his own church out of bondage, working under the mask of a newly-modelled comprehensiveness of charity, pleased many of the Dissenters. They were glad, by payment of a trifling fee, to open Richard Baxter's prison door. Defoe therefore was little thanked for urging that acceptance of such royal grace was an admission of the King's absolute claim to override the laws. "He that would serve men," said Defoe afterwards, "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 flattery and caresses of Popery, and when I protested against addresses of thanks for an illegal liberty of conscience founded on a dispensing power." The young patriot joined Monmouth when he landed in the West, and, after the night on Sedgmoor, was an exile. But King James's turn for exile quickly followed, and, after the Revolution, William of Orange recognised in Defoe the one sound and most honest English friend. To the cry raised by the opposition that King William was no true-born Englishman, Defoe replied with his satire of "The True-born Englishman," rhymes of which 80,000 copies were sold in the streets. Among their home truths are vigorous assertions of the claims of the people against persecution in the Church, or despotism in the State. In these he finds as dangerous a thing "A ruling priesthood, as a priest-rid king; And of all plagues with which mankind are curst, while of the kings false to their trust he says,— "When kings the sword of justice first lay down, Then came Queen Anne to the throne; ecclesiastic tyranny, and the old doctrine of the divine right to govern ill, recovered strength, and hard words hailed on the Dissenters. A substantial blow was aimed in a Bill that was to disqualify them from all civil employ Defoe in the pillory. G ments. It passed the Commons, but failed with the Lords, among whom were the foremost champions of English liberty. Bigoted preachers meanwhile lashed the populace into a heavenly mood for pulling chapels down; and Sacheverell, preaching at Oxford, had denounced him as no true son of the Church who did not raise against Dissent "the bloody flag and banner of defiance." Then it was that Defoe, a thriving citizen with much to lose, spoke boldly on behalf of liberty of conscience in his pamphlet called "The Shortest Way with the Dissenters." He wrote, as in all his controversial writing, to maintain a principle and not a party. He began his satire with a quotation. from Roger l'Estrange of a fable that might have been applied to James the Second's Act of Toleration. A cock at roost in a stable, having dropped from his perch, and finding himself in much danger among restless heels, has a fair proposal to make to the horses—that we shall all of us keep our legs quiet. This fable Defoe applied to the Dissenters, who were then asking for equal treatment, although they had been intolerant enough themselves not long since, when they had the upper hand. Professing, in his assumed character of a bigoted High Churchman of the day, to show the vice of Dissent before teaching its cure, he deals, in the first place, a fair blow to his own side for past intolerance. The Dissenters ought not, perhaps, to have been blind to the irony of the second half of the pamphlet; but in the first half the irony is not all against ecclesiastical intolerance. Defoe was against all intolerance, and to the bigotry of his own party Defoe gives-I think seriously and intentionally-the first hit. The succeeding satire on the persecuting spirit of the noisy party in the Church, since it could not easily surpass the actual extravagance of party spirit, had in it nothing but the delicate, sustained sharpness of ironical suggestion to reveal the author's purpose to the multitude. Several reasons, he says, are urged on behalf of the Dissenters "why we should continue and tolerate them among us," as: "They are very numerous, they say; they are a great part of the nation, and we cannot suppress them. To this may be answered, They are not so numerous as the Protestants in France, and yet the French king effectually cleared the nation of them at once, and we don't find he misses them at home." Besides, "the more numerous the more dangerous, and therefore the more need to suppress them; and if we are to allow them only because we cannot suppress them, then it ought to be tried whether we can or no.' It is said, also, that their aid is wanted against the common enemy. This, argues Defoe, is but the same argument of inconvenience of war-time that was urged against suppressing the old money; and the hazard, after all, proved to be small. "We can never enjoy a settled, uninterrupted union and tranquillity in this nation till the spirit of Whiggism, faction, and schism is melted down like the old money." The gist of the pamphlet, the scheme set forth on the title-page as the shortest way with the Dissenters, is propounded in this passage: "It one severe law were made and punctually executed, that whoever was found at a conventicle should be banished the nation and the preacher be hanged, we should soon see an end of the tale; they would all come to church, and one age would make us one again. To talk of five shillings a month for not coming to the Sacrament, and one shilling per week for not coming to church,-this is such a way of converting people as never was known, this is selling them a liberty to transgress for so much money. If it be not a crime, why don't we give them full licence? And if it be, no price ought to compound for the committing it; for that is selling a liberty to people to sin against God and the Government. . We hang men for trifles, and banish them for things not worth naming; but an offence against God and the Church, against the welfare of the world and the dignity of religion, shall be bought off for five shillings. This is such a shame to a Christian Government, that 'tis with regret I transmit it to posterity." The pamphlet delighted men of the Sacheverell school. A Cambridge Fellow thanked his bookseller for having sent him so excellent a treatise-next to the Holy Bible and the Sacred Comments the most valuable he had ever seen. Great was the reaction of wrath when the pamphlet was found to be a Dissenter's satire ; nevertheless, the Dissenters held by their first outcry against the author. Defoe, aged forty-two, paid for this service to the English people in the pillory, and as a prisoner in Newgate. But his " Hymn to the Pillory," which appeared on the first of the three days of the shame of the Government in his exposure, July 29, 30, and 31, in the year 1703, turned the course of popular opinion against the men who placed him there—men, as his rhyme said, scandals to the times, who "Are at a loss to find his guilt, And can't commit his crimes." It was in the next year, as a prisoner in Newgate, that Defoe in sets up "The his "Review," continued through nine years from 1704 to 1713. With "The Review," in which Defoe addressed to the people his own earnest thoughts upon all matters that concerned the common good, begins the history of English journalism as a power in the State and a reflection of the people's influence on English literature. To much vigorous argument on grave affairs of State, Defoe united censorship of social follies by including in his plan the machinery of a supposed Scandalous Club, for hearing and deciding on domestic questions. To this part of "The Review" it will be seen that we may trace most reasonably Richard Steele's first notion of "The Tatler." When Addison and Steele had successively passed to Oxford from the Charterhouse, where they had been schoolfellows and friends together, the paths by which they took |