His _Review of the Affairs of France_, which was a periodical news-pamphlet devoting itself to foreign affairs and what to-day we should call Town Topics, was no doubt Defoe’s introduction to fiction. When, that is to say, foreign news ran out he filled in his space with the chronicles of an invented Scandalous Club and there, a little in the style of La Bruyère and still more in the style of the later _Tatlers_, _Ramblers_, and _Spectators_, he presented the Town with slightly scandalous anecdotes of characters purely fictitious or suggested faintly by well-known living men. From that to inventing false news as in the case of the _Mrs. Veal_ fascicule and from that again to the production of sham autobiography-like _Robinson Crusoe_ is a very obvious progression. Few journalists would make it to-day, but to-day news being more common is more easily checked. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that, whether it were his intention or no, he did evolve a convention for fiction that up to a certain point was effective enough. That he intended so to do there is not, as was on the other hand the case with his great successor Samuel Richardson, any evidence. On the contrary, there is a good deal of evidence that several of his works of fiction were really intended as mystifications or frauds on the public. That does not interfere with the artistic merit of his work, which was very great. For whether you set out to hypnotize the public into believing for the time being that they have attended at a scene, or trick them into believing that they have read real memoirs when the memoirs are fictitious, the artistic, if not the ethical, results are nearly equal. There is, however, this difference: