That is perhaps a vain speculation, but a short consideration of the first great English novelist, who was for a time at least nearly solely novelist, would lead one to believe that such was indeed the case. Defoe was born about the time of the restoration of Charles II--that is to say, in 1660 or 1661--and died in 1731, aged in consequence about seventy. And it is interesting to note that his novels were all produced in the last twelve years of his life--as an expedient for procuring bread and butter after bankruptcy produced by too ingenious speculations both financial and philosophical. That gets rid of the theory we might otherwise have entertained that he was a Restoration novelist in the sense that the friends of Charles II were Restoration dramatists. Nevertheless, the active portions of Defoe’s life were so passed in the seventeenth century that it comes naturally to think of him rather as Jacobean than Georgian or eighteenth century. It is, that is to say, not in the pomposity of the eighteenth century that Captain Singleton or Colonel Jack or Moll Flanders seem to be clothed. They were rather mobile, swaggering, piratical creatures seated on barrels and smoking their yards of clay than strutters in brocades and ruffles. And probably Defoe’s ideal was the substantial London merchant, sturdily planted over his stout calves on square feet. That was his ideal because he had himself lamentably failed in attaining to it. His financial ideas are said to have found favour in succeeding ages; his plans for increasing the national revenues, like Swift’s, it is said, would have been admirable could they have been adopted. So his moralities are practical rather than theological--it was to the respectable suffrages of the merchants that his pious passages addressed themselves. Thus his moralizings may have been less hypocritical than those of most of his contemporaries, his predecessors or descendants; but the aspiring after respectability was none the less as marked. What, however, is in him the most interesting from our special point of view of tracing the development of the art of the novel is the fact that Defoe may be called the first English or foreign writer to strive after some sort of satisfactory convention for the novel. He aimed, that is to say, at being convincing--at convincing his reader that he was reading of real adventures set in the, as it were, official biographies of real individuals. Such fictitious documents as _The Apparition of Mrs. Veal_, the _Memoirs of a Cavalier_, or the _History of the Plague in London_ are very near to historic forgeries and ought perhaps to be regarded as fictitious journalism. For, whatever else he was or wasn’t, Defoe was the first great journalist.