Finally, if the reader wishes to taste Defoe's flavour in its perfection let him examine carefully those passages in the concluding twenty pages of the book, wherein Captain Singleton is shown as awakening to the wickedness of his past life, and the admirable dry reasoning of William by which the Quaker prevents him from committing suicide and persuades him to keep his ill-gotten wealth, "with a resolution to do what right with it we are able; and who knows what opportunity Providence may put into our hands.... As it is without doubt, our present business is to go to some place of safety, where we may wait His will." How admirable is the passage about William's sister, the widow with four children who kept a little shop in the Minories, and that in which the penitent ex-pirates are shown us as hesitating in Venice for two years before they durst venture to England for fear of the gallows. "Captain Singleton" was published in 1720, a year after "Robinson Crusoe," when Defoe was fifty-nine. Twenty years before had seen "The True-Born Englishman" and "The Shortest Way with the Dissenters"; and we are told that from "June 1687 to almost the very week of his death in 1731 a stream of controversial books and pamphlets poured from his pen commenting upon and marking every important passing event." The fecundity of Defoe as a journalist alone surpasses that of any great journalist we can name, William Cobbett not excepted, and we may add that the style of "Captain Singleton," like that of "Robinson Crusoe," is so perfect that there is not a single ineffective passage, or indeed a weak sentence, to be found in the book. EDWARD GARNETT.