the renewing of old recollections produced by some old friend’s visit finding an anecdote, a detail, to incorporate into the “Journal of the Plague.” And we should have asked ourselves by what strange play of genius the unenchanted island, where all the sober elaborations of fact clothed so completely the vivid realizations of imagination, should have risen out of the mists amid those trim, old-fashioned alleys, and green plots, and stiff parterres of flowers. Alas! That demon of research which in its poking and prying sometimes puts old bones together, and sometimes scatters to the winds the ashes of the dead, has spoiled this pleasant picture. Impelled by its influence, an unwary or else too painstaking student, some twenty years ago, was seized with the idea of roaming the earth in search of relics of Defoe. And the diabolical powers which put this fatal pursuit into his mind directed him to a bundle of yellow papers in the State Paper Office which has, alas! for ever and ever made an end of our man of genius. These treacherous papers give us to wit under his own hand that he was in reality in full action in the most traitorous of employments during the period of his supposed retirement. The following, which is the first of these fatally self-elucidatory letters, will reveal at once the inconceivable occupation to which Defoe in his downfall lent himself. He had perhaps compromised himself too much, and been too completely identified with Harley at the end to be considered capable of more honorable and evident employment. The letter is addressed to the secretary of the minister who had given him his disgraceful office: It was proposed by my Lord Townsend that I should appear as if I were as before under the displeasure of the government, and separated from the Whigs, and that I might be more serviceable in a kind of disguise than if I appeared openly. In the interval of this, Dyer, the “News-Letter” writer, being dead, and Dormer, his successor, being unable by his troubles to carry on that work, I had an offer of a share in the property as well as in the management of that work. I immediately acquainted my Lord Townsend of it, who, by Mr. Buckley, let me know it would be a very acceptable piece of service, for that letter was really very prejudicial to the public, and the most difficult to come at in a judicial way in case of offense given. My Lord was pleased to add, by Mr. Buckley, that he would consider my service in that case, as he afterwards did.