In these two fragments, which illustrate a very common device of De Foe's, we come across two elements of positive power over our imaginations. Even De Foe's imagination recognised and delighted in a certain margin of mystery to this harsh world of facts and figures. He is generally too anxious to set everything before us in broad daylight; there is too little of the thoughts and emotions which inhabit the twilight of the mind; of those dim half-seen forms which exercise the strongest influence upon the imagination, and are the most tempting subjects for the poet's art. De Foe, in truth, was little enough of a poet. Sometimes by mere force of terse idiomatic language he rises into real poetry, as it was understood in the days when Pope and Dryden were our lawgivers. It is often really vigorous. The well-known verses-- Wherever God erects a house of prayer, The devil always builds a chapel there-- which begin the 'True-born Englishman,' or the really fine lines which occur in the 'Hymn to the Pillory,' that 'hieroglyphic state machine, contrived to punish fancy in,' and ending-- Tell them that placed him here, They're scandals to the times, Are at a loss to find his guilt, _And can't commit his crimes_-- may stand for specimens of his best manner. More frequently he degenerates into the merest doggerel, _e.g._-- No man was ever yet so void of sense, As to debate the right of self-defence, A principle so grafted in the mind, With nature born, and does like nature bind; Twisted with reason, and with nature too, As neither one nor t'other can undo--