n and they are not strong enough to resist the dread of disinheritance, or of the world's scorn, or of the cursed tyrant gentility, and dare not marry the woman they love above all. But if prudence is strong, passion is strong too, and principle is not, and women (Heaven keep them!) are weak. We all know what happens then. Prudent papas and mammas say, George will sow his wild oats soon, he will be tired of that odious woman one day, and we'll get a good marriage for him: meanwhile it is best to hush the matter up and pretend to know nothing about it. But suppose George does the only honest thing in his power, and marries the woman he loves above all; then what a cry you have from parents and guardians, what shrieks from aunts and sisters, what excommunications and disinheriting! "What a weak fool George is! say his male friends in the clubs; and no hand of sympathy is held out to poor Mrs. George, who is never forgiven, but shunned like a plague, and sneered at by a relentless pharisaical world until death sets her free. As long as she is unmarried, avoid her if you will; but as soon as she is married, go! be kind to her, and comfort her, and pardon and forget, if you can! And lest some charitable people should declare that I am setting up here an apology for vice, let me here, and by way of precaution, flatly contradict them, and declare that I only would offer a plea for marriage. But where has Minna Löwe been left during this page of disquisition? Blushing under the vine-leaves positively, whilst I was thanking my stars that she never became Mrs. George Fitz-Boodle. And yet who knows what thou mightst have become, Minna, had such a lot fallen to thee? She was too pretty and innocent-looking to have been by nature that artful, intriguing huzzy that education made her, and that my experience found her. The case was simply this, not a romantical one by any means. At this very juncture, perhaps, it will be as well to pause, and leave the world to wait for a month until it learns the result of the loves of Minna Löwe and George Fitz-Boodle. I have other tales still more interesting in store; and though I have never written a line until now, I doubt not before long to have excited such a vast sympathy in my favour, that I shall become as popular as the oldest (I mean the handsomest) of living authors, and most print-publishers, desirous of taking my portrait, may as well, therefore, begin sending in their proposals to Mr. Nickisson; nor shall I so much look to a high remuneration for sitting (egad! it is a frightful operation), as to a clever and skilful painter, who must likewise be a decently bred and companionable person. Nor is it merely upon matters relating to myself (for egotism I hate, and the reader will remark that there is scarcely a single I in the foregoing pages) that I propose to speak. Next month, for instance (besides the continuation of my own and other people's memoirs), I shall acquaint the public with a discovery which is intensely interesting to all fathers of families I have in my eye three new professions which a gentleman may follow with credit and profit, which are to this day unknown, and which, in the present difficult times, cannot fail to be eagerly seized upon. : Before submitting them to public competition, I will treat privately with parents and guardians, or with young men of good education and address; such only will suit. G. S. F. B. DANIEL DE FOE. If Criticism, in its difficult task of arranging the precedence of the great names whose writings have won for them an immortal and imperishable name, could adopt as its sole standard or measure of comparative eminence, the degree of influence produced by an author upon his own or succeeding ages, or the extent to which his works have been diffused over various and remote countries, De Foe would vindicate for himself a pedestal in the Temple of Fame little, if at all, lower than that which the universal consent of civilized mankind has so justly conceded to Cervantes. If, in addition to this, suffering and virtue, that noblest heroism which enables its possessor to support unmerited persecution, obloquy, and sorrow, that lofty and divine spirit which, disregarding, with a calm and patient dignity the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,» awaits the distant time when party rage and personal malignity, shall have passed away, and Posterity shall have learned the lesson, so rarely understood by a contemporary age, to understand the Work of Genius, and that still more difficult lesson to Man in the abstract, as it is to Man the individual, the lesson of Gratitude-if Criticism might found her judgments upon these data, the Author of 'Robinson Crusoe' would have nothing to fear from a comparison with that gentle yet mighty spirit which created the half-crazed yet chivalrous Knight of La Mancha. The cell of Newgate, no less than the dungeon of the In quisition, was a proof of that deep truth that or at least the contemporary world- knows : 群 the world nothing of its greatest men. » It will be our endeavour, in the succeeding pages, to show that the comparison which we have just made, flattering as it may appear, and indicative of a too high admiration of the genius of De Foe; is not unjust to the memory of Cervantes and in the discussion of our subject to devole our attention, at a length somewhat greater than usual, first, to a sketch of the Life of this great writer, and secondly, on another occasion, to an attempt to justify by a critical examination of his chief works, an admiration which may appear to some of our readers extravagant: and we are willing to hope, that our biographical notice of De Foe, by the pictures it presents of great and frequent vicissitudes-supported with invariable calmness-of a long and chequered life, devoted unceasingly to the good of his native country, and the virtue and civilization of man will be no less interesting, than an attempt, however imperfect, to investigate and develope the means by which he has acquired so elevated a place in the great Hero-temple of Immortality. In no country perhaps so remarkably as in England has Literature been indebted to the middle and lower classes for its most distinguished names and although the Student may be inclined to assign various social and political reasons for a peculiarity which must forcibly strike him who has made even a superficial acquaintance with the biographical History of Great Britain, the great relative wealth, importance, and intelligence, of those classes, consequent upon the peculiar genius of the English Constitution, are perhaps hardly sufficient to resolve this problem, and to account for a phenomenon which is so striking, and in some measure anomalous, even after due allowance is made for the agency of that powerful influence. That the envelopements of ignorance, which during the long burial of the dark ages, had enswathed Science and Reason, like the bandages that wrap the limbs of some dead Pharaoh, were torn off by the hand of an (1) obscure monk, is certainly a fact to which the history of other countries may perhaps afford a parallel; that the intellect (2) which, with a power, we speak it reverently, almost like that of the Creator, weighed and numbered the colossal masses which circle rejoicing in the infinity of space, received its first education in a poor man's cottage,-such a fact, we say, may occur in the annals of other lands, however inferior may be the importance of the cases so alledged by the citizen of any country but England. Shakspeare too-the greatest of all; that sublime genius, before whose fame the poets, the philosophers, the reasoners, the moralists of all ages, the brightest stars of the intellectual heaven, pale their fire, as before a Sun-his cradle also was rocked by a poor man's fireside it was beneath a humble roof and few are humbler than that lowly one at Stratford, which has become to all the nations of the earth the Mecca of the soul-that the gentlest, noblest, sublimest of mankind first saw the light. Washington Irving beautifully says, that genius delights to nestle its offspring in obscure places, and what he remarks of the locality, will, in the literary history of England at least, be found singularly true also of the origin, of genius. : To this-we may almost call it-general rule De Foe was no exception nor should we, even in the absence of specific information relative to his birth and parentage, hesitate to form a conclusion from the nature of his works, that he must have sprung, if not from the lowest, at least from no very elevated portion of the social scale. He was the son of a butcher in London, and retained all his life the strongest characteristics not only of the class from which he sprung, and to which, in spite of his literary and political celebrity, he continued to belong, but we fancy that we can detect, in all his writings the stamp of the Liveryman of the City of London, and the plain, manly, indepen (') Roger Bacon. () Newton. |