at an early age, and was probably a youth of somewhat wandering tendencies, as he claims to have been “out” with Monmouth, and does not appear in any recognized occupation till after that unfortunate attempt. He must have been twenty-four when he first becomes visible as a hosier in Cornhill, which seems a very natural and indeed rather superior beginning in life for the son of the butcher in Cripplegate. He laid claim afterward to having been a trader,--not a shopkeeper,--a claim supported more or less from a source not favorable to Defoe, by Oldmixon, who says that his only connection with the trade was that of “peddling to Portugal,” whatever that may mean. We may take it for granted that he had occasions of visiting the Continent in connection, one way or other, with his trade. The volume of advice to shopkeepers which is entitled the “Complete English Tradesman,” written and published in the latter part of his life, though it does not seem to be taken by his biographers in general as any certain indication that he himself made his beginning in a shop, is nevertheless full of curious details of the life of the London shopkeeper of his time, to which class he assuredly belonged. We learn from this curious production that vanity was even more foolish in the eighteenth century than it is now. We are acquainted with sporting shopkeepers who ride to hounds, and with foolish young men who fondly hope to be mistaken for “swells”; but a shopkeeper in a wig and a sword passes the power of imagination. It is a droll example of the fallacy of all our fond retrospections and preference of the good old times to find that in Defoe’s day this was by no means an extraordinary circumstance. “The playhouses and balls,” he says, “are more filled with citizens and young tradesmen than with gentlemen and families of distinction; the shopkeepers wear different garbs than what they were wont to do, are decked out with long wigs and swords, and all the frugal badges of trade are quite disdained and cast aside.” We may take from this book as an illustration of the habits of the age the following description of a young firm which is clearly on the way to ruin: