enterprises, which, if they did not gain him wealth, have conferred a renown, that will descend the current of time with the language wherein his works are written.” His misfortunes however, even if accompanied by some imprudence, did not alienate his friends. “I was invited,” he says in his Appeal to Honour and Justice, “by some merchants with whom I had corresponded abroad, and some also at home, to settle at Cadiz, and that with offers of very good commissions; but Providence, which had other work for me to do, placed a secret aversion in my mind. Some time after, I was, without the least application of mine, and being then seventy miles from London, sent for to be Accomptant to the Commissioners of the Glass Duty; in which service I continued to the determination of their commission.” [Illustration: _Engraved by J. Thomson._ DE FOE. _From a Print by M. Vandergucht._ Under the Superintendence of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. _London, Published by Charles Knight & C^o. Ludgate Street._ ] Having lost this occupation, Defoe’s active mind expanded itself in a variety of schemes. He wrote, he tells us, many sheets about the coin; he proposed a law for registering seamen; he projected county banks; factories for goods; a commission of inquiry into the estates of bankrupts; a pension-office for the relief of the poor; an academy “to encourage polite learning, and to polish and refine the English tongue;” and an academy for the education of women, with a view to the improvement of society, by training them to a more exemplary discharge of their social duties. Notices of various of these schemes, and of the use or abuse of a speculative spirit in a mercantile country, will be found in his Essay on Projects, published in January, 1697. In 1701 he produced a satire in verse, called The True-born Englishman, which arose out of a personal and virulent attack, by one Tutchen, on William III., whose faults were finally summed up in the epithet “foreigner.” “This,” Defoe says, “filled me with a kind of rage against the book, and gave birth to a trifle, which I never could hope should have met with such general acceptation as it did—I mean, The True-born Englishman. How this poem was the occasion of my being known to his Majesty; how I afterwards was received by him; how employed; and how, above all my capacity of deserving, rewarded, is no part of the present case:” and history does not supply us with the particulars here left unnoticed. But whatever were Defoe’s services or their rewards, he always expressed his gratitude and affection for King William’s memory in ardent terms. In the same year he published two able tracts in support of the principles of the Revolution, entitled, one, The Original Power of the Collective Body of the People of England Examined and Asserted; the other, The Freeholder’s Plea against the Stock-jobbing Elections of Parliament-men.