This was a most preposterous method; but the eagerness of my fancy prevailed, and to work I went. I felled a cedar-tree, and I question much, whether Solomon ever had such a one for the building of the Temple at Jerusalem; it was five feet ten inches diameter at the lower part next the stump, and four feet eleven inches diameter at the end of twenty-two feet, where it lessened, and then parted into branches. It was not without infinite labour that I felled this tree; I was twenty days hacking and hewing at the bottom, and fourteen more getting the branches and limbs and the vast spreading head of it cut off; after this it cost me a month to shape it and dub it to a proportion, and to something like the bottom of a boat, that it might swim upright as it ought to do. It cost me near three months more to clear the inside, and work it out so as to make an exact boat of it: this I did indeed without fire, by mere mallet and chisel, and by the dint of hard labour, till I had brought it to be a very handsome periagua, and big enough to have carried six-and-twenty men, and consequently big enough to have carried me and all my cargo. _Robinson Crusoe_ OTHER PROSE-WRITERS =1. John Arbuthnot (1667–1735).= Arbuthnot was born in Kincardineshire, Scotland, studied medicine at Oxford, and spent the latter part of his life in London, where he became acquainted with Pope and Swift. His writings are chiefly political, and include the _Memoirs of Scriblerus_ (1709), which, though published in the works of Pope, is thought to be his; _The History of John Bull_ (1712 or 1713), ridiculing the war-policy of the Whigs; and _The Art of Political Lying_ (1712). Arbuthnot writes with wit and vivacity, and with many pointed allusions. At his best he somewhat resembles Swift, though he lacks the great devouring flame of the latter’s personality. =2. Lord Bolingbroke (1678–1751).= Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, was one of the chief political figures of the period. At the age of twenty-six he was Secretary for War in the Tory Government; was thereafter implicated in Jacobite plots; was compelled to flee to France; was pardoned, and permitted to return to England in 1723; had once more to return to France in 1735; then, after seven years’ exile, was finally restored to his native land. Bolingbroke prided himself on being both a patron of letters and a man of letters. He influenced Pope, not always to the latter’s advantage. In 1753 appeared his _Letter to Windham_ (written in 1717); then in 1749 he produced _Letters on the Spirit of Patriotism_ and _The Idea of a Patriot King_. These reflect the Tory sentiments of their author, are written with a vigor that is often near to coarseness, and have all the tricks and vices of the rhetorician.