where he acted a conspicuous part, is extremely interesting to us, who wish to know what actually passed, however this circumstantiality may have disgusted contemporaneous readers. History is chiefly valuable, as it transmits a faithful copy of the manners and sentiments of every age. This narrative of Defoe is a drama, in which he introduces the highest peers and the lowest peasants speaking and acting, according as they were each actuated by their characteristic passions; and while the man of taste is amused by his manner, the man of business may draw instruction from the documents, which are appended to the end, and interspersed in every page. This publication had alone preserved his name, had his Crusoe pleased us less.” Chalmers naturally makes the most of its merits, for his Life of Defoe was originally prefixed to a reprint of it in 1786: but the author would have been little known if his popularity had depended on this work only. After his return from Scotland, Defoe resided for some time at Newington. He incurred great obloquy, he says, for trying to make the best of the peace of Utrecht after it was concluded, and bore infinite reproaches as having been hired and bribed to defend a bad peace, upon the supposition that he was the author of pamphlets in which he had no share. To escape from this persecution he went to Halifax, in Yorkshire, where he had ample opportunity to observe the confidence of the Jacobite party, and the success with which they laboured to make converts among the lower ranks. To counteract these plottings, he wrote A Seasonable Caution, Reasons against the Succession of the House of Hanover, and some other pamphlets with similar titles; intending, he says, by means of their apparent drift, to put them into the hands of persons whom the Jacobites had deluded. But Defoe was unfortunate as an ironical writer: perhaps the same qualities which gave his fictions such an air of truth tended to give his irony too much the appearance of earnest. On this, as on a former occasion, some persons were foolish or malicious enough to misconstrue his meaning, and to accuse him of writing seditious libels in favour of the Pretender. On this frivolous charge an information was filed against him in the spring of 1713, on which he was taken into custody, and obliged to find bail to a large amount; and the consequences might have been still more serious, but for a second intervention of Harley, who procured a free pardon for him in the following November. Speaking of these very publications in his Appeal, he protests that “if the Elector of Hanover had given me a thousand pounds to have written for the interests of his succession, and to expose, and render the interest of the Pretender odious and ridiculous, I could have done nothing more effectual to these purposes than these books were.”