De Foe set the critics at defiance while he had the people on his side. As a commercial legislator he knew, that it is rapid sale that is the great incentive: and, in August, 1719, he published a second volume of Surprising Adventures, with similar success[85]. In hope of profit and of praise, he produced in August, 1720, Serious Reflections during the Life of Robinson Crusoe, with his Vision of the Angelic World. He acknowledges that the present work is not merely the product of the two first volumes, but the two first may rather be called the product of this: the fable is always made for the moral, not the moral for the fable. He, however, did not advert, that instruction must be insinuated rather than enforced. That this third volume has more morality than fable, is the cause I fear, that it has never been read with the same avidity as the former two, or spoken of with the same approbation. We all prefer amusement to instruction; and he who would inculcate useful truths, must study to amuse, or he will offer his lessons to an auditory, neither numerous, nor attentive. The tongue of detraction is seldom at rest. It has often been repeated that De Foe had surreptitiously appropriated the papers of Alexander Selkirk, a Scotch mariner, who having lived solitary on the isle of Juan Fernandez, four years and four months, was relieved on the 2nd of February, 1708-9, by captain Woodes Rogers, in his cruising voyage round the world. But let no one draw inferences till the fact be first ascertained. The adventures of Selkirk had been thrown into the air, in 1712, for literary hawks to devour[86]; and De Foe may have catched a common prey, which he converted to the uses of his intellect, and distributed for the purposes of his interest[87]. Thus he may have fairly acquired the fundamental incident of Crusoe's life; but, he did not borrow the various events, the useful moralities, or the engaging style. Few men could write such a poem; and few Selkirks could imitate so pathetic an original. It was the happiness of De Foe, that as many writers have succeeded in relating enterprises by land, he excelled in narrating adventures by sea, with such felicities of language, such attractive varieties, such insinuative instruction, as have seldom been equalled, but never surpassed[88].