ought to know that irony is at once the most dangerous and the most ineffectual weapon in the whole armoury of the press.  The fertility and ingenuity of his intellect may be best gauged by the number of modern enterprises and contrivances that are foreshadowed in his work.  Here are a few, all utterly unknown in his own day, collected by a student of his works; a Board of Trade register for seamen; factories for goods:  agricultural credit banks; a commission of enquiry into bankruptcy; and a system of national poor relief.  They show him to have been an independent and courageous thinker where social questions were concerned.

He was nearly sixty before he had published his first novel, Robinson Crusoe, the book by which he is universally known, and on which with the seven other novels which followed it the foundation of his literary fame rests.  But his earlier works—­they are reputed to number over two hundred—­possess no less remarkable literary qualities.  It is not too much to say that all the gifts which are habitually recommended for cultivation by those who aspire to journalistic success are to be found in his prose.  He has in the first place the gift of perfect lucidity no matter how complicated the subject he is expounding; such a book as his Complete English Tradesman is full of passages in which complex and difficult subject-matter is set forth so plainly and clearly that the least literate of his readers could have no doubt of his understanding it.  He has also an amazingly exact acquaintance with the technicalities of all kinds of trades and professions; none of our writers, not even Shakespeare, shows half such a knowledge of the circumstances of life among different ranks and conditions of men; none of them has realized with such fidelity how so many different persons lived and moved.  His gift of narrative and description is masterly, as readers of his novels know (we shall have to come back to it in discussing the growth of the English novel); several of his works show him to have been endowed with a fine faculty of psychological observation.  Without the least consciousness of the value of what he was writing, nor indeed with any deliberate artistic intention, he made himself one of the masters of English prose.

Defoe had been the champion of the Whigs; on the Tory side the ablest pen was that of Jonathan Swift.  His works proclaim him to have had an intellect less wide in its range than that of his antagonist but more vigorous and powerful.  He wrote, too, more carefully.  In his youth he had been private secretary to Sir William Temple, a writer now as good as forgotten because of the triviality of his matter, but in his day esteemed because of the easy urbanity and polish of his prose.  From him Swift learned the labour of the file, and he declared in later life that it was “generally believed that this author has advanced our English tongue to as great a perfection as it can well bear.”  In fact he added to the ease and cadences he had learned from Temple qualities of vigour and directness of his own which put his work far above his master’s.  And he dealt with more important subject-matter than the academic exercises on which Temple exercised his fastidious and meticulous powers of revision.