The first attempt to do justice to the merits of De Foe, and to rescue the main events of his useful and laborious life from oblivion, was made by the late Mr. George Chalmers, of the Board of Trade, whose biography the present publishers now reprint. Since that period, gentlemen of learning and ability have followed his steps. Dr. Towers, in the Biographia Britannica, has sketched the life of De Foe, and Mr. Alexander Chalmers, in the Biographical Dictionary, has also done justice to his memory. Sir Walter Scott gave the aid of his great name to the same object, by publishing an edition of De Foe. Mr. Walter Wilson, of the Middle Temple, has published lately a long and detailed Life of De Foe, which is by far the most complete yet compiled, and should be consulted by every student desirous of becoming thoroughly acquainted with the events of his chequered career. The present edition of his works will supply a desideratum in English literature, and enable his countrymen to possess, at a small cost, the various productions of his versatile genius, and be instructed by one of the most deservedly popular and really useful authors that has ever adorned the country. We subjoin the able critiques on De Foe, by the late Charles Lamb, a man exactly qualified to appreciate him, by a writer in the Retrospective Review, and by sir Walter Scott. For the first, the world is indebted to Mr. Wilson[107]. "It has happened not seldom that one work of some author has so transcendently surpassed in execution the rest of his compositions, that the world has agreed to pass a sentence of dismissal upon the latter, and to consign them to total neglect and oblivion. It has done wisely in this, not to suffer the contemplation of excellences of a lower standard to abate or stand in the way of the pleasure it has agreed to receive from the masterpiece. "Again, it has happened, that from no inferior merit of execution in the rest, but from superior good fortune in the choice of its subject, some single work shall have been suffered to eclipse and cast into shade the deserts of its less fortunate brethren. This has been done with more or less injustice in the case of the popular allegory of Bunyan, in which the beautiful and scriptural image of a pilgrim or wayfarer (we are all such upon earth!) addressing itself intelligibly and feelingly to the bosoms of all, has silenced and made almost to be forgotten, the more awful and scarcely less tender beauties of the Holy War made by Shaddai upon Diabolus, of the same author, a romance less happy in its subject, but surely well worthy of a secondary immortality. But in no instance has this excluding partiality been exerted with more unfairness than against what may be termed the secondary novels or romances of De Foe.