enter into competition with either or both, as an interesting and even exciting means of passing the time, would have entered very few heads at all and have been contemptuously dismissed from most of those that it did enter. Addison and Steele in the "Coverley Papers" had shown the way to construct this new spell: Defoe actually constructed it. It may be that some may question whether the word "exciting" applies exactly to his stories. But this is logomachy: and in fact a well-willing reader _can_ get very fairly excited while the Cavalier is escaping after Marston Moor; while it is doubtful whether the savages have really come and what will be the event; while it is again doubtful whether Moll is caught or not; or what has become of those gains of the boy Jack, which can hardly be called ill-gotten because there is such a perfect unconsciousness of ill on the part of the getter. At any rate, if such a reader cannot feel excitement here, he would utterly stagnate in any previous novel. In presence of this superior--this emphatically and doubly "novel"--interest, all other things become comparatively unimportant. The relations of _Robinson Crusoe_ to Selkirk's experiences and to one or two other books (especially the already mentioned _Isle of Pines_) may not unfitly employ the literary historian who chooses to occupy himself with them. The allegory which Defoe alleges in it, and which some biographers have endeavoured to work out, cannot, I suppose, be absolutely pooh-poohed, but presents no attractions whatever to the present writer. Whether the _Cavalier_ is pure fiction, or partly embroidered fact, _is_ a somewhat interesting question, if only because it seems to be impossible to find out the answer: and the same may be said of the not impossible (indeed almost more than probable) Portuguese maps and documents at the back of _Captain Singleton_. To disembroil the chronological muddle of _Roxana_, and follow out the tangles of the hide-and-seek of that most unpleasant "lady of pleasure" and her daughter, may suit some. But, apart from all these things, there abides the fact that you can _read_ the books--read them again and again--enjoy them most keenly at first and hardly less keenly afterwards, however often you repeat the reading.