perfectly in his hero’s place that he repeats his blunders as well as his triumphs.  Thus, what reader ever followed Defoe’s hero through weary, feverish months of building a huge boat, which was too big to be launched by one man, without recalling some boy who spent many stormy days in shed or cellar building a boat or dog house, and who, when the thing was painted and finished, found it a foot wider than the door, and had to knock it to pieces?  This absolute naturalness characterizes the whole story.  It is a study of the human will also,—­of patience, fortitude, and the indomitable Saxon spirit overcoming all obstacles; and it was this element which made Rousseau recommend Robinson Crusoe as a better treatise on education than anything which Aristotle or the moderns had ever written.  And this suggests the most significant thing about Defoe’s masterpiece, namely, that the hero represents the whole of human society, doing with his own hands all the things which, by the division of labor and the demands of modern civilization, are now done by many different workers.  He is therefore the type of the whole civilized race of men.

In the remaining works of Defoe, more than two hundred in number, there is an astonishing variety; but all are marked by the same simple, narrative style, and the same intense realism.  The best known of these are the Journal of the Plague Year, in which the horrors of a frightful plague are minutely recorded; the Memoirs of a Cavalier, so realistic that Chatham quoted it as history in Parliament; and several picaresque novels, like Captain Singleton, Colonel Jack, Moll Flanders, and Roxana.  The last work is by some critics given a very high place in realistic fiction, but like the other three, and like Defoe’s minor narratives of Jack Sheppard and Cartouche, it is a disagreeable study of vice, ending with a forced and unnatural repentance.

SAMUEL RICHARDSON (1689-1761)

To Richardson belongs the credit of writing the first modern novel.  He was the son of a London joiner, who, for economy’s sake, resided in some unknown town in Derbyshire, where Samuel was born in 1689.  The boy received very little education, but he had a natural talent for writing letters, and even as a boy we find him frequently employed by working girls to write their love letters for them.  This early experience, together with his fondness for the society of “his dearest ladies” rather than of men, gave him that intimate knowledge of the hearts of sentimental and uneducated women which is manifest in all his work.  Moreover, he was a keen observer of manners, and his surprisingly accurate descriptions often compel us to listen, even when he is most tedious.  At seventeen years of age he went to London and learned the printer’s trade, which he followed to the end of his life.  When fifty years of age he had a small reputation as a writer of elegant epistles,