He was fifty-eight at the time this book was written--a man worn with endless work and strife, but ever ready for more--a man who had fallen and failed, and made but little of his life. It is said that he was at his highest point of external prosperity when he published “Robinson Crusoe”; but when we remember that he was at that time engaged in the inconceivable muddle of “Mist’s Journal,” it seems almost impossible to believe this, or to understand how anything but poverty could drive him into such a disgraceful employment. No doubt, to a man who at heart had once been an honest man, and was so no more, it must have been a relief and blessed deliverance to escape away into the distant seas, to refresh his ever-active soul with the ingenious devices of the shipwrecked sailor, and bury himself in that life so different from his own, the savage necessities, the primitive cares. The goats and the parrot and poor Friday: what an ease and comfort to escape into their society after bamboozling Mist, and reporting to my lord at St. James’s! Was it a desperate expedient of nature to save him from utter self-contempt? Such a man, even if his conscience had grown callous, must have required some outlet from the dreadful slavery to which he had bound himself. “Robinson Crusoe” is the work by which Defoe is best known, which is, after all, the most effectual guarantee that it is his best work. But it is not, to our thinking, worthy of being placed in competition with the “Journal of the Plague”--a history so real, so solemn and impressive, so full of the atmosphere and sentiment of the time, that it reaches a far higher point of literary art than anything else Defoe has written. For this is not prose alone, nor that art of making fiction look like truth, which is supposed to be his greatest excellence: it is one of the most impressive pictures of a historical incident which has struck the poetic imagination everywhere, and of which we have perhaps more authentic records than of any other historical episode. Neither Boccaccio nor Manzoni have equaled Defoe in the story of the plague. To the old Italian it was a horror from which the life-loving fled with loathing as well as fear, and which they tried to forget and put out of their sight. Defoe’s minute description of the argument carried on within his own mind by the narrator is curiously characteristic of the tendency to elaborate and explain which enters so largely into all his works. The mental condition of the respectable citizen, divided between concern for his life and concern for his property, seeing with reasonable eyes that death was not certain, but that in case of flight ruin was,--moved by the divination which he uses in all good faith, yet perhaps not with sufficient devoutness to have allowed himself to be guided by it had it been contrary to his previous dispositions, and at bottom by a certain _vis inertiæ_ and disinclination to move, which is clearly indicated