are all of them subjects in which Defoe showed a keen interest in his acknowledged works.  In providing amusement for his readers, he did not soar above his age in point of refinement; and in providing instruction, he did not fall below his age in point of morality and religion.  It is a notable circumstance that one of the marks by which contemporaries traced his hand was “the little art he is truly master of, of forging a story and imposing it on the world for truth.”  Of this he gave a conspicuous instance in Mist’s Journal in an account of the marvellous blowing up of the island of St. Vincent, which in circumstantial invention and force of description must be ranked among his master-pieces.  But Defoe did more than embellish stories of strange events for his newspapers.  He was a master of journalistic art in all its branches, and a fertile inventor and organizer of new devices.  It is to him, Mr. Lee says, and his researches entitle him to authority, that we owe the prototype of the leading article, a Letter Introductory, as it became the fashion to call it, written on some subject of general interest and placed at the commencement of each number.  The writer of this Letter Introductory was known as the “author” of the paper.

Another feature in journalism which Defoe greatly helped to develop, if he did not actually invent, was the Journal of Society.  In the Review he had provided for the amusement of his readers by the device of a Scandal Club, whose transactions he professed to report.  But political excitement was intense throughout the whole of Queen Anne’s reign; Defoe could afford but small space for scandal, and his Club was often occupied with fighting his minor political battles.  When, however, the Hanoverian succession was secured, and the land had rest from the hot strife of parties, light gossip was more in request.  Newspapers became less political, and their circulation extended from the coffee-houses, inns, and ale-houses to a new class of readers.  “They have of late,” a writer in Applebee’s Journal says in 1725, “been taken in much by the women, especially the political ladies, to assist at the tea-table.”  Defoe seems to have taken an active part in making Mist’s Journal and Applebee’s Journal, both Tory organs, suitable for this more frivolous section of the public.  This fell in with his purpose of diminishing the political weight of these journals, and at the same time increased their sale.  He converted them from rabid party agencies into registers of domestic news and vehicles of social disquisitions, sometimes grave, sometimes gay in subject, but uniformly bright and spirited in tone.