When curiosity has contemplated such copiousness, such variety, and such excellence, it naturally inquires which was the last of De Foe's performances? Were we to determine from the date of the title page, the Plan of Commerce must be admitted to be his last. But if we must judge from his prefatory declaration, in The Abuse of the Marriage-Bed, where he talks of closing his days with this satire, which he was so far from seeing cause of being ashamed of, that he hoped he should not be ashamed of it where he was going to account for it, we must finally decide, that our author closed his career "with this upright intention for the good of mankind[99]." De Foe, after those innumerable labours, which I have thus endeavoured to recall to the public recollection, died in April, 1731, within the parish of St. Giles's, Cripplegate, London, at an age, if he were born in 1663, when it was time to prepare for his last voyage. He left a widow, Susannah, who did not long survive him, and six sons and daughters, whom he boasts of having educated as well as his circumstances would admit. His son Daniel is said to have emigrated to Carolina; of Benjamin, his second son, no account can be given[100]. His youngest daughter Sophia, married Mr. Henry Baker, a person more respectable as a philosopher than a poet, who died in 1774, at the age of seventy. His daughter Maria married one Langley; but Hannah and Henrietta probably remained unmarried, since they were heiresses only of a name, which did not recommend them. With regard to Norton, from Daniel and Ostræa sprung[101], Bless'd with his father's front, and mother's tongue, it is only said that he was a wretched writer in the Flying Post, and the author of Alderman Barber's Life. De Foe probably died insolvent; for letters of administration on his goods and chattels were granted to Mary Brooke, widow, a creditrix, in September, 1733, after summoning in official form the next of kin to appear[102]. John Dunton[103], who personally knew our author, describes him, in 1705, as a man of good parts and clear sense; of a conversation, ingenious and brisk; of a spirit, enterprising and bold, but of little prudence; with good nature and real honesty. Of his petty habits, little now can be told, more than he has thus confessed himself[104]: "God, I thank thee, I am not a drunkard, or a swearer, or a whoremaster, or a busybody, or idle, or revengeful; and though this be true, and I challenge all the world to prove the contrary, yet, I must own, I see small satisfaction in all the negatives of common virtues; for though I have not been guilty of any of these vices, nor of many more, I have nothing to infer from thence, but _Te Deum laudamus_." He says himself: Confession will anticipate reproach, He that reviles us then, reviles too much; All satire ceases when the men repent, 'Tis cruelty to lash the penitent.