The raw materials of several of Defoe’s elaborate tales, such as Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack, are to be found in the columns of Mist’s and Applebee’s.  In connexion with Applebee’s more particularly, Defoe went some way towards anticipating the work of the modern Special Correspondent.  He apparently interviewed distinguished criminals in Newgate, and extracted from them the stories of their lives.  Part of what he thus gathered he communicated to Applebee; sometimes, when the notoriety of the case justified it, he drew up longer narratives and published them separately as pamphlets.  He was an adept in the art of puffing his own productions, whether books or journals.  It may be doubted whether any American editor ever mastered this art more thoroughly than Defoe.  Nothing, for instance, could surpass the boldness of Defoe’s plan for directing public attention to his narrative of the robberies and escapes of Jack Sheppard.  He seems to have taken a particular interest in this daring gaol-breaker.  Mr. Lee, in fact, finds evidence that he had gained Sheppard’s affectionate esteem.  He certainly turned his acquaintance to admirable account.  He procured a letter for Applebee’s Journal from Jack, with “kind love,” and a copy of verses of his own composition.  Both letter and verses probably came from a more practised pen, but, to avert suspicion, the original of the letter was declared to be on view at Applebee’s, and “well known to be in the handwriting of John Sheppard.”  Next Defoe prepared a thrilling narrative of Jack’s adventures, which was of course described as written by the prisoner himself, and printed at his particular desire.  But this was not all.  The artful author further arranged that when Sheppard reached his place of execution, he should send for a friend to the cart as he stood under the gibbet, and deliver a copy of the pamphlet as his last speech and dying confession.  A paragraph recording this incident was duly inserted in the newspapers.  It is a crowning illustration of the inventive daring with which Defoe practised the tricks of his trade.

One of Defoe’s last works in connection with journalism was to write a prospectus for a new weekly periodical, the Universal Spectator, which was started by his son-in-law, Henry Baker, in October, 1728.  There is more than internal and circumstantial evidence that this prospectus was Defoe’s composition.  When Baker retired from the paper five years afterwards, he drew up a list of the articles which had appeared under his editorship, with the names of the writers attached.  This list has been preserved, and from it we learn that the first number, containing a prospectus and an introductory essay on the qualifications of a good writer, was written by Defoe.  That experienced journalist naturally tried to give an air of novelty to the enterprise.  “If this paper,” the first sentence runs, “was not intended to be what no paper at present is, we should never attempt