service.  Daniel De Foe, the author of Robinson Crusoe, 1719, was a prolific political writer, conducted his Review in the interest of the Whigs, and was imprisoned and pilloried for his ironical pamphlet, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters.  Steele, who was a violent writer on the Whig side, held various public offices, such as Commissioner of Stamps, and Commissioner for Forfeited Estates, and sat in Parliament.  After the Revolution of 1688 the manners and morals of English society were somewhat on the mend.  The court of William and Mary, and of their successor, Queen Anne, set no such example of open profligacy as that of Charles II.  But there was much hard drinking, gambling, dueling, and intrigue in London, and vice was fashionable till Addison partly preached and partly laughed it down in the Spectator.  The women were mostly frivolous and uneducated, and not unfrequently fast.  They are spoken of with systematic disrespect by nearly every writer of the time, except Steele.  “Every woman,” wrote Pope, “is at heart a rake.”  The reading public had now become large enough to make letters a profession.  Dr. Johnson said that Pope was the first writer in whose case the book-seller took the place of the patron.  His translation of Homer, published by subscription, brought him between eight and nine thousand pounds and made him independent.  But the activity of the press produced a swarm of poorly-paid hack-writers, penny-a-liners, who lived from hand to mouth and did small literary jobs to order.  Many of these inhabited Grub Street, and their lampoons against Pope and others of their more successful rivals called out Pope’s Dunciad, or epic of the dunces, by way of retaliation.  The politics of the time were sordid, and consisted mainly of an ignoble scramble for office.  The Whigs were fighting to maintain the Act of Succession in favor of the House of Hanover, and the Tories were secretly intriguing with the exiled Stuarts.  Many of the leaders, such as the great Whig champion, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, were without political principle or even personal honesty.  The Church, too, was in a condition of spiritual deadness.  Bishoprics and livings were sold, and given to political favorites.  Clergymen, like Swift and Lawrence Sterne, were worldly in their lives and immoral in their writings, and were practically unbelievers.  The growing religious skepticism appeared in the Deist controversy.  Numbers of men in high position were Deists; the Earl of Shaftesbury, for example, and Pope’s brilliant friend, Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, the head of the Tory ministry, whose political writings had much influence upon his young French acquaintance, Voltaire.  Pope was a Roman Catholic, though there was little to show it in his writings, and the underlying thought of his famous Essay on Man was furnished him by Bolingbroke.  The letters of the cold-hearted Chesterfield to his son were accepted as a manual of conduct, and La Rochefoucauld’s cynical maxims were quoted as authority on life and human nature.  Said Swift: