It is not a very delicate hand which traces these, and many another wave of strange ancestors. “Still the ladies loved the conquerors.” But Defoe’s rude lines went straight to the mark. The public had no objection to a coarse touch when it was effective, and Englishmen are rarely offended by ridicule; never, we may say, when it is home-born. The stroke was so true that the native sense of humor was hit. Perhaps England did not, on account of Defoe’s verses, like the Dutchmen any better, but she acknowledged Tutchin’s seditious assault upon the foreigners to be fully answered, and the universal laugh cleared the air. Eighty thousand copies of this publication were sold, it is said, in the streets, where everybody bought the “lampoon,” which, assailing everybody, gave no individual sting. It also procured for Defoe a personal introduction to the king. Whether it was to this or to his former services that he owed a small appointment he held for some years, it is difficult to say, but evidently he did not serve King William for nothing. In the mean time Defoe resumed his business occupations, and set up a manufactory of pantiles at Tilbury, where he employed a hundred poor laborers, and throve, or seems to have thriven, in his new industry, living in something like luxury, and paying off, as described, his previous debts. His head was full of the projects upon which one of his most successful pamphlets was written, and he recommended many sweeping schemes and made many bold suggestions on all subjects, from the institution of an income tax to that of an academy like the French. It was a period when the air was swarming with schemes, and Defoe was not necessarily original in his suggestions; but his brain was teeming with life and energy, and there is no saying which was absolutely his own thought, and which the thought of others. He was a man to whom ideas came as he was writing, and were flung off into the air, to fly or fall as they might. One thought, one fancy, suggested another. For instance, after arguing long and well in favor of the war with France, which was the object of King William’s life, and the only thing that could save--according to the ideas of his party on the Continent, and eventually of most sound Protestants in England--the Protestant faith, Defoe, with a sudden whimsical perception of certain possibilities on the other side, came out with a pamphlet entitled, “Reasons Against a War with France,” which was founded on the suggestion that a war with Spain instead would be very profitable, and that the Spanish Indies were a booty well worth having: a sudden dash into new fields which must have brought up the public which he had persuaded to fight France with a certain gasp of breathless inability to follow this rapid reasoner in the instantaneous change of front, which meant no real change of opinion, but only the flash of a sudden happy thought.