The year after this account was published, Selkirk and his adventures attracted the notice of Steele, who was not likely to pass unobserved a man and a story so strange and so new. In his paper of "The Englishman," Dec. 1713, he communicates farther particulars of Selkirk. Steele became acquainted with him; he says, that "he could discern that he had been much separated from company from his aspect and gesture. There was a strong but cheerful seriousness in his looks, and a certain disregard to the ordinary things about him, as if he had been sunk in thought. The man frequently bewailed his return to the world, which could not, he said, with all its enjoyments, restore him to the tranquillity of his solitude." Steele adds another very curious change in this wild man, which occurred some time after he had seen him. "Though I had frequently conversed with him, after a few months' absence, he met me in the street, and though he spoke to me, I could not recollect that I had seen him. Familiar converse in this town had taken off the loneliness of his aspect, and quite altered the air of his face." De Foe could not fail of being struck by these interesting particulars of the character of Selkirk; but probably it was another observation of Steele which threw the germ of Robinson Crusoe into the mind of De Foe. "It was matter of great curiosity to hear him, as he was a man of sense, give an account of the _different revolutions in his own mind in that long solitude_." The work of De Foe, however, was no sudden ebullition: long engaged in political warfare, condemned to suffer imprisonment, and at length struck by a fit of apoplexy, this unhappy and unprosperous man of genius on his recovery was reduced to a comparative state of solitude. To his injured feelings and lonely contemplations, Selkirk in his Desert Isle, and Steele's vivifying hint, often occurred; and to all these we perhaps owe the instructive and delightful tale, which shows man what he can do for himself, and what the fortitude of piety does for man. Even the personage of Friday is not a mere coinage of his brain: a Mosquito Indian, described by Dampier, was the prototype. Robinson Crusoe was not given to the world till 1719, seven years after the publication of Selkirk's adventures.[143] Selkirk could have no claims on De Foe; for he had only supplied the man of genius with that which lies open to all; and which no one had, or perhaps could have, converted into the wonderful story we possess but De Foe himself. Had De Foe not written Robinson Crusoe, the name and story of Selkirk had been passed over like others of the same sort; yet Selkirk has the merit of having detailed his own history, in a manner so interesting, as to have attracted the notice of Steele, and to have inspired the genius of De Foe.