Authors, English -- 18th century -- Biography; Defoe, Daniel, 1661?-1731
The first intent of laws
Was to correct the effect, and check the cause.
And all the ends of punishment
Were only future mischiefs to prevent:
But justice is inverted, when
Those engines of the law,
Instead of pinching vicious men,
Keep honest ones in awe[34].
He employed this involuntary leisure in correcting for the press a
collection of his writings, which, with several things he had no hand
in, had been already published by a piratical printer. He thought it a
most unaccountable boldness in him to print that particular book called
The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, while he lay under the public
resentment for the same fact. In this collection of 1703, there are
one-and-twenty treatises in poetry and prose, beginning with The
True-born Englishman, and ending with The Shortest Way to Peace and
Union. To this volume there was prefixed the first print of De Foe; to
which was afterwards added, the apt inscription: _Laudatur et
alget_[35].
In the solitariness of a gaol, the energy of De Foe projected the
Review. This is a periodical paper in 4to., which was first published on
the 19th of February, 1703-4; and which was intended to treat of news,
foreign and domestic; of politics, British and European; of trade,
particular and universal. But our author foresaw, from the natural
aversion of the age to any tedious affair, that however profitable, the
world would never read, if it were not diverting. With this design, both
instructive and amusing, he skilfully institutes a Scandal Club, which
discusses questions in divinity, morals, war, trade, language, poetry,
love, marriage, drunkenness, and gaming. Thus, it is easy to see, that
the Review pointed the way to the Tatlers, Spectators, and Guardians,
which may be allowed, however, to have treated those interesting topics
with more delicacy of humour, more terseness of style, and greater depth
of learning; yet has De Foe many passages, both of prose and poetry,
which, for refinement of wit, neatness of expression, and efficacy of
moral, would do honour to Steele or to Addison. Of all this was Johnson
unconscious, when he speaks of the Tatlers and Spectators as the first
English writers who had undertaken to reform either the savageness of
neglect, or the impertinence of civility; to show when to speak, or to
be silent; how to refuse, or how to comply[36].
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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