A catalogue of the numerous works known, or confidently believed by the compiler to be Defoe’s, and of those also which are attributed to him on more doubtful evidence, is given by Mr. Chalmers at the end of that edition of his Life which is subjoined to Stockdale’s edition of Robinson Crusoe, in 2 vols. 8vo., 1790; hardly one in four of them has been named in this short account. Defoe was a very rapid, as well as a laborious composer: it is said that he once wrote two shilling pamphlets in a single day. His controversial works however have long lost their interest; and his principal historical work, that on the Union, is too prolix and minute to find general acceptation in our days. In his acquaintance with commerce, and insight into the principles by which it is governed, he is entitled to rank with the most skilful of his contemporaries; but the progress of economical science has of course deprived his commercial writings of most of their value, except as records of the past. Of his numerous works of fiction, we may notice the History of the Plague of London in 1665, Memoirs of a Cavalier, and Robinson Crusoe, as the best known and the most deserving. The first, which professes to be the journal of a saddler resident in Whitechapel during the awful visitation which he describes, is said to have been received as genuine even by Dr. Mead, as no doubt it has been by very many of those who are unacquainted with its real history. There is a homely pathos, a minute and scrupulous adherence to verisimilitude in it which almost irresistibly persuades the reader that none but an eyewitness could have written such an account. The Memoirs of a Cavalier possess the same air of truth. They relate the campaigns of a young Englishman of good family, first in Germany under Gustavus Adolphus, afterwards on the royal side in our civil wars; and depict with great vividness and fidelity the principal events of those interesting and stirring times. But popular as these works have been and deserve to be, they sink into obscurity when compared with the universal acceptation of Robinson Crusoe; the only thing, according to Dr. Johnson, written by mere man, that was ever wished longer by its readers, except Don Quixote and the Pilgrim’s Progress. And Bunyan and Defoe had some points in common. Both came of the people, and both, without the advantages or trammels of a learned education, wrote for and to the people; they slighted no source of pathos or eloquence as being too humble, and cared little for homeliness of phrase, if it expressed their meaning clearly and strongly. It is needless to give any account of a book, which in one shape or other, for in the numerous reprints it has often been curtailed and mutilated, must be familiar to every reader. The story is well known to be identical with that of Alexander Selkirk, who, after a solitary abode of four years on the island of Juan Fernandez, returned to England in 1709.