Borrow was not a theorizer, and yet he took a quaint interest in other people’s theorizings. He asked me to explain myself more fully. My reply in substance was something like this: Although in “Robinson Crusoe” the autobiographer is really introduced only to act as eye-witness for the purpose of bringing out and authenticating the incidents of the dramatic action, Defoe had the artistic craftiness to make it appear that this was not so—to make it appear that the incidents are selected by Crusoe in such a way as to exhibit and develop the emotions moving within his own breast. Defoe’s _apparent_ object in writing the story was to show the effect of a long solitude upon the human heart and mind; but it was not so—it was simply to bring into fiction a series of incidents and adventures of extraordinary interest and picturesqueness—incidents such as did in part happen to Alexander Selkirk. But Defoe was a much greater artist than he is generally credited with being, and he had sufficient of the artistic instinct to know that, interesting as these external incidents were in themselves, they could be made still more interesting by humanizing them—by making it appear that they worked as a great life-lesson for the man who experienced them, and that this was why the man recorded them. Those moralizings of Crusoe upon the way in which the disasters of his life came upon him as “judgments,” on account of his running away from his parents, seem to humanize the wheels of circumstance. They create in the reader’s mind the interest in the man’s personality which Defoe wished to create. In reply to my criticism, Borrow said, “May not the same be said of Le Sage’s ‘Gil Blas’?”