but at another time he admitted that he had been employed by the King and rewarded by him beyond his deserts.  Any reward that he received for his literary services was well earned, and there was nothing dishonourable in accepting it.  For concealing the connexion while the King was alive, he might plead the custom of the time.  But in the confusion of parties and the uncertainty of government that followed William’s death, Defoe slid into practices which cannot be justified by any standard of morality.

It was by accident that Defoe drifted into this equivocal position.  His first writings under the new reign were in staunch consistency with what he had written before.  He did not try to flatter the Queen as many others did by slighting her predecessors; on the contrary, he wrote a poem called The Mock Mourners, in which he extolled “the glorious memory”—­a phrase which he did much to bring into use—­and charged those who spoke disrespectfully of William with the vilest insolence and ingratitude.  He sang the praises of the Queen also, but as he based his joy at her accession on an assurance that she would follow in William’s footsteps, the compliment might be construed as an exhortation.  Shortly afterwards, in another poem, The Spanish Descent, he took his revenge upon the fleet for not carrying out his West Indian scheme by ridiculing unmercifully their first fruitless cruise on the Spanish coast, taking care at the same time to exult in the capture of the galleons at Vigo.  In yet another poem—­the success of the True Born Englishman seems to have misguided him into the belief that he had a genius for verse—­he reverted to the Reformation of Manners, and angered the Dissenters by belabouring certain magistrates of their denomination.  A pamphlet entitled A New Test of the Church of England’s Loyalty—­in which he twitted the High-Church party with being neither more nor less loyal than the Dissenters, inasmuch as they consented to the deposition of James and acquiesced in the accession of Anne—­was better received by his co-religionists.

But when the Bill to prevent occasional conformity was introduced by some hot-headed partisans of the High Church, towards the close of 1702, with the Queen’s warm approval, Defoe took a course which made the Dissenters threaten to cast him altogether out of the synagogue.  We have already seen how Defoe had taken the lead in attacking the practice of occasional conformity.  While his co-religionists were imprecating him as the man who had brought this persecution upon them, Defoe added to their ill-feeling by issuing a jaunty pamphlet in which he proved with provoking unanswerableness that all honest Dissenters were noways concerned in the Bill.  Nobody, he said, with his usual bright audacity, but himself “who was altogether born in sin,” saw the true scope of the measure.  “All those people who designed the Act as a blow to the Dissenting interests in England