fashion, and we believe and feel every word he says. The book, although wonderfully good throughout, is unequal: the prime interest only lasts until he is rescued, and ends with his embarkation for England. The remainder of his travels becomes, as a narrative, comparatively tiresome and tame; and we feel, besides, that, after his unrivalled experience, he should have remained in England, "the observed of all observers." Yet it must be said that we are indebted to his later journey in Spain and France, his adventures in the Eastern Seas, his caravan ride overland from China to Europe, for much which illustrates the manners and customs of navigation and travel in that day. _Robinson Crusoe_ stands alone among English books, a perennial fountain of instruction and pleasure. It aids in educating each new generation: children read it for its incident; men to renew their youth; literary scholars to discover what it teaches of its time and of its author's genius. Its influence continues unabated; it incites boys to maritime adventure, and shows them how to use in emergency whatever they find at hand. It does more: it tends to reclaim the erring by its simple homilies; it illustrates the ruder navigation of its day; shows us the habits and morals of the merchant marine, and the need and means of reforming what was so very bad. Defoe's style is clear, simple, and natural. He wrote several other works, of which few are now read. Among these are the _Account of the Plague, The Life and Piracies of Captain Singleton_, and _The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders_. He died on the 24th of April, 1731. RICHARDSON.--Samuel Richardson, who, notwithstanding the peculiar merits of Defoe, must be called the _Father of Modern Prose Fiction_, was born in Derbyshire, in 1689. The personal events of his life are few and uninteresting. A carpenter's son, he had but little schooling, and owed everything to his own exertions. Apprenticed to a printer in London, at the age of fifteen, he labored assiduously at his trade, and it rewarded him with fortune: he became, in turn, printer of the Journals of the House of Commons, Master of the Stationers' Company, and Printer to the King. While young, he had been the confidant of three young women, and had written or corrected their love-letters for them. He seems to have had great fluency in letter-writing; and being solicited by a publisher to write a series of familiar letters on the principal concerns of life, which might be used as models,--a sort of "Easy Letter-Writer,"--he began the task, but, changing his plan, he wrote a story in a series of letters. The first volume was published in 1741, and was no less a work than _Pamela_. The author was then fifty years old; and he presents in this work a matured judgment concerning the people and customs of the day,--the printer's notions of the social condition of England,--shrewd, clever, and defective.