Formidable as the list of these works seems, it does not represent more than Defoe’s average rate of production for thirty years of his life.  With grave anxieties added to the strain of such incessant toil, it is no wonder that nature should have raised its protest in an apoplectic fit.  Even nature must have owned herself vanquished, when she saw this very protest pressed into the service of the irresistible and triumphant worker.  All the time he was at large upon bail, awaiting his trial.  The trial took place in July, 1715, and he was found guilty.  But sentence was deferred till next term.  October came round, but Defoe did not appear to receive his sentence.  He had made his peace with the Government, upon “capitulations” of which chance has preserved the record in his own handwriting.  He represented privately to Lord Chief Justice Parker that he had always been devoted to the Whig interest, and that any seeming departure from it had been due to errors of judgment, not to want of attachment.  Whether the Whig leaders believed this representation we do not know, but they agreed to pardon “all former mistakes” if he would now enter faithfully into their service.  Though the Hanoverian succession had been cordially welcomed by the steady masses of the nation, the Mar Rebellion in Scotland and the sympathy shown with this movement in the south warned them that their enemies were not to be despised.  There was a large turbulent element in the population, upon which agitators might work with fatal effect.  The Jacobites had still a hold upon the Press, and the past years had been fruitful of examples of the danger of trying to crush sedition with the arm of the law.  Prosecution had been proved to be the surest road to popularity.  It occurred therefore that Defoe might be useful if he still passed as an opponent of the Government, insinuating himself as such into the confidence of Jacobites, obtained control of their publications, and nipped mischief in the bud.  It was a dangerous and delicate service, exposing the emissary to dire revenge if he were detected, and to suspicion and misconstruction from his employers in his efforts to escape detection.  But Defoe, delighting in his superior wits, and happy in the midst of dangerous intrigues, boldly undertook the task.

CHAPTER VIII.

LATER JOURNALISTIC LABOURS.

For the discovery of this “strange and surprising” chapter in Defoe’s life, which clears up much that might otherwise have been disputable in his character, the world is indebted solely to Mr. William Lee.  Accident put Mr. Lee on the right scent, from which previous biographers had been diverted by too literal and implicit a faith in the arch-deceiver’s statements, and too comprehensive an application of his complaint that his name was made the hackney title of the times, upon which all sorts of low scribblers fathered their vile productions.  Defoe’s secret services on Tory papers exposed him, as we