DANIEL DE FOE.

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EXT to the Holy Scriptures, says Charles Lamb, it may be safely asserted that "Robinson Crusoe" has, ever since it was written, exerted the first and most powerful influence upon the juvenile mind of England, nor has its popularity been much less among any of the other nations of Christendom.

It is one of those books which, like the "Thousand and One Nights" and the "Pilgrim's Progress," become the common property of the people; are handed down, as precious heir-looms, from generation to generation; appeal not less powerfully to the sympathies of the lower classes than to those of the man of culture; and are inseparably associated with the fame and glory of the language in which they are written.

It is one of those books by which mankind realises a distinct and tangible gain. We can arrive at some exact conception of what we owe to "Robinson Crusoe." We are indebted to it for the beautiful ideal of an island situated "far amidst the melancholy main," which affords our imaginations, when weary with the burden and the heat of the fray, a delightfully serene and tranquil resting-place. Some such conception had dawned on the fancies of men before: but the Islands of the Blest, and the Utopia of Sir Thomas More, and the New Atlantis of Lord Bacon, like the Atlantis of Plato, do not engage our sympathies; do not affect our hearts; are no more than the artificial stage on which theorists erect their schemes of social polity and government, or the fancies of poets, which lack a local habitation and a name.

But Robinson Crusoe's island is, so to speak, an actual fact. We see it unrolled before us as clearly as if it had been mapped out by engineers. Its silent woods, for ages untrodden by human foot; its

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CHARACTERISTICS OF DE FOE'S STYLE.

green savannahs, descending in waves of verdure to the margin of a smiling sea; its picturesque cliffs and rocks, its fertile groves, its leafy bowers and crystal streams, are clearly identified by the inner eye, and grow as familiar to us as the lanes and meadows of our birth-land. The hut and the cave, the browsing goats, and the strange birds of glittering plumage we know them all as faithfully as the dearest friends of our childhood. And the Solitary himself is an "old familiar face," on whose simple tale we hang enraptured with a breathless interest; in whose alternations of joy and sorrow, fear and hope, doubt and confidence, we feel ourselves immediately involved; whom we follow into the retirement of his cave, in his lonely wanderings on the shore, in his excursions over his domains, with all the anxiety that can be inspired by the most intimate friendship.

It is unnecessary at this time, after so many years of criticism on the merits and demerits of De Foe's best known romance, to insist that the peculiar quality of his genius is its realism,—a realism curiously tempered and informed by a strong imagination. He seems to have possessed a remarkable power of convincing himself,—of assuring his own mind of the truth of the incidents he related,-and, consequently, of assuring his readers of their truth. He sat down to write his romances, not like an ordinary novelist, who is justly solicitous of the structure of his plot, the sequence of his scenes, and the disposition of his characters; but like an eye-witness, who has shared in or been present at each incident, and whose object is simply to write down a plain, unvarnished tale of what he has done, suffered, or known. He possessed the Shakspearean faculty of projecting himself into the characters he invented, until they ceased to be characters, and became persons; until he lost his individual self-consciousness, and absolutely identified himself with the creations of his brain.

It is remarkable that a writer so richly endowed with the poetry of invention should so seldom rise to poetry of sentiment or eloquence of language. His style is vigorous, manly, clear; but it has an air of monotony about it, is pitched in a low key, and never warmed by any sudden burst of emotion or brightened by any fugitive gleam of fancy. From first to last it preserves an equable flow, and is as calm and even when describ ing a tropical solitude as when sketching the squalid purlieus of a great city.