seems to share Defoe’s ingenuous astonishment at this “strange instance of ungrateful violence,” and conjectures that it must have proceeded from imaginary wrong of a very grievous nature, such as a suspicion that Defoe had instigated the Government to prosecute him.  It is perhaps as well that it should have fallen to so loyal an admirer to exhume Defoe’s secret services and public protestations; the record might otherwise have been rejected as incredible.

Mr. Lee’s researches were not confined to Defoe’s relations with Mist and his journal, and the other publications mentioned in the precious letter to Mr. de la Faye.  Once assured that Defoe did not withdraw from newspaper-writing in 1715, he ransacked the journals of the period for traces of his hand and contemporary allusions to his labours.  A rich harvest rewarded Mr. Lee’s zeal.  Defoe’s individuality is so marked that it thrusts itself through every disguise.  A careful student of the Review, who had compared it with the literature of the time, and learnt his peculiar tricks of style and vivid ranges of interest, could not easily be at fault in identifying a composition of any length.  Defoe’s incomparable clearness of statement would alone betray him; that was a gift of nature which no art could successfully imitate.  Contemporaries also were quick at recognising their Proteus in his many shapes, and their gossip gives a strong support to internal evidence, resting as it probably did on evidences which were not altogether internal.  Though Mr. Lee may have been rash sometimes in quoting little scraps of news as Defoe’s, he must be admitted to have established that, prodigious as was the number and extent of the veteran’s separate publications during the reign of the First George, it was also the most active period of his career as a journalist.  Managing Mist and writing for his journal would have been work enough for an ordinary man; but Defoe founded, conducted, and wrote for a host of other newspapers—­the monthly Mercurius Politicus, an octavo of sixty-four pages (1716-1720); the weekly Dormer’s News-Letter (written, not printed, 1716-1718); the Whitehall Evening Post (a tri-weekly quarto-sheet, established 1718); the Daily Post (a daily single leaf, folio, established 1719); and Applebee’s Journal (with which his connexion began in 1720 and ended in 1726).

The contributions to these newspapers which Mr. Lee has assigned, with great judgment it seems to me, to Defoe, range over a wide field of topics, from piracy and highway robberies to suicide and the Divinity of Christ.  Defoe’s own test of a good writer was that he should at once please and serve his readers, and he kept this double object in view in his newspaper writings, as much as in Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and the Family Instructor.  Great as is the variety of subjects in the selections which Mr. Lee has made upon internal evidence, they