At the Revolution, in 1688, Defoe lost no time in making his adhesion to the new monarch conspicuous.  He was, according to Oldmixon, one of “a royal regiment of volunteer horse, made up of the chief citizens, who, being gallantly mounted and richly accoutred, were led by the Earl of Monmouth, now Earl of Peterborough, and attended their Majesties from Whitehall” to a banquet given by the Lord Mayor and Corporation of the City.  Three years afterwards, on the occasion of the Jacobite plot in which Lord Preston was the leading figure, he published the first pamphlet that is known for certain to be his.  It is in verse, and is entitled A New Discovery of an Old Intrigue, a Satire levelled at Treachery and Ambition.  In the preface, the author said that “he had never drawn his pen before,” and that he would never write again unless this effort produced a visible reformation.  If we take this literally, we must suppose that his claim to have been an author eighteen years before had its origin in his fitful vanity.  The literary merits of the satire, when we compare it with the powerful verse of Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel, to which he refers in the exordium, are not great.  Defoe prided himself upon his verse, and in a catalogue of the Poets in one of his later pieces assigned himself the special province of “lampoon.”  He possibly believed that his clever doggerel was a better title to immortality than Robinson Crusoe.  The immediate popular effect of his satires gave some encouragement to this belief, but they are comparatively dull reading for posterity.  The clever hits at living City functionaries, indicated by their initials and nicknames, the rough ridicule and the biting innuendo, were telling in their day, but the lampoons have perished with their objects.  The local celebrity of Sir Ralph and Sir Peter, Silly Will and Captain Tom the Tailor, has vanished, and Defoe’s hurried and formless lines, incisive as their vivid force must have been, are not redeemed from dulness for modern readers by the few bright epigrams with which they are besprinkled.

CHAPTER II.

KING WILLIAM’S ADJUTANT.

Defoe’s first business catastrophe happened about 1692.  He is said to have temporarily absconded, and to have parleyed with his creditors from a distance till they agreed to accept a composition.  Bristol is named as having been his place of refuge, and there is a story that he was known there as the Sunday Gentleman, because he appeared on that day, and that day only, in fashionable attire, being kept indoors during the rest of the week by fear of the bailiffs.  But he was of too buoyant a temperament to sink under his misfortune from the sense of having brought it on himself, and the cloud soon passed away.  A man so fertile in expedients, and ready, according to his own ideal of a thoroughbred trader, to turn himself to anything, could not long remain unemployed.