convinced of the truth of the story, as though he would, of all things, refrain from pushing us unfairly for our belief. The writer, he says, took the story from the lady's own mouth: he was, of course, obliged to disguise names and places; but was himself 'particularly acquainted with this lady's first husband, the brewer, and with his father, and also with his bad circumstances, and knows that first part of the story.' The rest we must, of course, take upon the lady's own evidence, but less unwillingly, as the first is thus corroborated. We cannot venture to suggest to so calm a witness that he has invented both the lady and the writer of her history; and, in short, that when he says that A. says that B. says something, it is, after all, merely the anonymous 'he' who is speaking. In giving us his authority for 'Moll Flanders,' he ventures upon the more refined art of throwing a little discredit upon the narrator's veracity. She professes to have abandoned her evil ways, but, as he tells us with a kind of aside, and as it were cautioning us against over-incredulity, 'it seems' (a phrase itself suggesting the impartial looker-on) that in her old age 'she was not so extraordinary a penitent as she was at first; it seems only' (for, after all, you mustn't make _too_ much of my insinuations) 'that indeed she always spoke with abhorrence of her former life.' So we are left in a qualified state of confidence, as if we had been talking about one of his patients with the wary director of a reformatory.