What provocation De Foe had given to Pope we cannot determine, but he has not escaped the lash of that gentleman’s pen.  Mr. Pope in his second book of his Dunciad thus speaks of him;

  Earless on high flood unabash’d De Foe,
  And Tutchin flagrant from the scourge below.

It may be remarked that he has joined him with Tutchin, a man, whom judge Jeffries had ordered to be so inhumanly whipt through the market-towns, that, as we have already observed, he petitioned the King to be hanged.  This severity soured his temper, and after the deposition and death of King James, he indulged his resentment in insulting his memory.  This may be the reason why Pope has stigmatized him, and perhaps no better a one can be given for his attacking De Foe, whom the author of the Notes to the Dunciad owns to have been a man of parts.  De Foe can never, with any propriety, be ranked amongst the dunces; for whoever reads his works with candour and impartiality, must be convinced that he was a man of the strongest natural powers, a lively imagination, and solid judgment, which, joined with an unshaken probity in his moral conduit, and an invincible integrity in his political sphere, ought not only to screen him from the petulant attacks of satire, but transmit his name with some degree of applause to posterity.

De Foe, who enjoyed always a competence, and was seldom subject to the necessities of the poets, died at his house at Islington, in the year 1731.  He left behind him one son and one daughter.  The latter is married to Mr. Henry Baker, a gentleman well known in the philosophical world.

[Footnote A:  Jacob, vol. ii. p. 309.]

[Footnote B:  See Preface to the True Born Englishman.]

[Footnote C:  See Preface to vol. ii.]

* * * * *

Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe,

This lady was born at Ilchester in Somersetshire September 11, 1674, being the eldest of three daughters of Mr. Walter Singer, a gentleman of good family, and Mrs. Elizabeth Portnel, both persons of great worth and piety.  Her father was not a native of Ilchester, nor an inhabitant, before his imprisonment there for non-conformity in the reign of King Charles ii.  Mrs. Portnel, from a principle of tenderness, visited those who suffered on that account, and by this accident an acquaintance Commenced, which terminated in the nuptial union.  They who were acquainted with the lady, who is the subject of this article, in her early, years, perhaps observed an uncommon display of genius as prophetic of that bright day which afterwards ensued.