Nothing else that Defoe has done is on the same level. It is pitched on too high a key perhaps for the multitude. His innocent thief, “Colonel Jack,” begins with a picture both amusing and touching of the curious moral denseness and confusion of a street boy; his “Cavalier” is a charming young man. But both these and all the rest of Defoe’s heroes and heroines grow heavy and tedious at the end. The “Journal of the Plague” is not like them in this respect. The conclusion--the sudden surprise and delicious sense of relief, the joy which makes the passers-by stop and shake hands with one another in the streets, and the women call out from windows with tears and outcries of gladness--is sudden and overwhelming as the reality. We are caught in the growing despair, and suddenly in a moment deliverance comes. Here alone Defoe is not too long; the unexpected is brought in with a skill and force not less remarkable than that which in the previous pages has portrayed the slow growth and inevitable development of the misery. Up to this anticlimax of unlooked-for joy the calamity has grown, every new touch intensifying the awful reality. But the recovery is sudden, and told without an unnecessary word. It is the only instance in which Defoe has followed the instinct of a great artist and shown that he knew how to avail himself of the unwritten code and infallible methods of art. We forget his shortcomings when we discuss this which is to our mind much his greatest work, and it is well that we should leave him in this disposition. He died mysteriously alone, after a period of wandering and hiding which nobody can explain. Whether he was in trouble with creditors, or with political enemies, or with the exasperated party which he had managed to outwit; whether he kept out of the way that his family might make better terms for themselves, or that he might keep the remains of his money out of the hands of an undutiful son, or a grasping son-in-law, nobody can tell. He died in remote lodgings, all alone, and his affairs were administered by a stranger, perhaps his landlady, no one knows. His domestic circumstances have been referred to during his life only in the vaguest way. He had a wife and a numerous family when he was put in the pillory; he had a wife, a son who was unkind, and three daughters at the end; but that is all we know. He died at seventy-two “of a lethargy,” no doubt fallen into the feebleness and hopelessness of lonely old age; and that is all. His life overflowed with activity and business. To be doing seems to have been a necessity of his being. But he never seems to have enjoyed the importance due to his powers, and in an age when men of letters filled the highest posts never would appear to have risen above his citizen circle, his shop-keeping ways. Something in the man must have accounted for this, but it is difficult to say what it was; for the age did not require a high standard of truthfulness, and the worst of his misdoings were kept