"The narrative manner of De Foe has a naturalness about it, beyond that of any novel or romance writer. His fictions have all the air of true stories. It is impossible to believe while you are reading them, that a real person is not narrating to you everywhere nothing but what really happened to himself. To this, the extreme homeliness of their style mainly contributes. We use the word in its best and heartiest sense,--that which comes home to the reader. The narrators everywhere are chosen from low life, or have had their origin in it; therefore they tell their own tales, (Mr. Coleridge has anticipated us in this remark,) as persons in their degree are observed to do, with infinite repetition, and an overacted exactness, lest the hearer should not have minded, or have forgotten some things that had been told before. Hence the emphatic sentences, marked in the good old (but deserted) Italic type; and hence, too, the frequent interposition of the reminding old colloquial parenthesis, 'I say,' 'mind,' and the like, when the story-teller repeats what to a practised reader might appear to have been sufficiently insisted upon before. What pirates, what thieves, and what harlots, are the thief, the harlot, and the pirate of De Foe? We would not hesitate to say, that in no other book of fiction, where the lives of such characters are described, is guilt and delinquency made less seductive, or the suffering made more closely to follow the commission, or the penitence more earnest or bleeding, or the intervening flashes of religious visitation, upon the rude and uninstructed soul, more meltingly or fearfully painted. They, in this, come near to the tenderness of Bunyan; while the lively pictures and incidents in them, as in Hogarth, or in Fielding, tend to diminish that fastidiousness to the concerns and pursuits of common life, which an unrestrained passion for the ideal and the sentimental is in danger of producing." The writer in the Retrospective Review observes: "We avail ourselves with some satisfaction of an opportunity of introducing to our readers an old and valued acquaintance, as one whom they may have had the misfortune to lose sight of, amidst the perplexities of life and the competition of more obtrusive candidates for their notice. For our own part, surrounded as we are by the bustle and cares of middle age, the mere mention of our author's name falls upon us as cool and refreshing as a drop of rain in the hot and parched midday; for it never fails to bring along with it the recollection of the morning of our life, those green and pleasant years, when the solitary inhabitant of the desert island was perpetually mingling with the day-dreams of our imagination.