When, however, the ingenious inventor had completed the story artistically, carried us through all the outcast’s anxieties and efforts, and shown him triumphant over all difficulties, prosperous, and again in communication with the outer world, the spirit of the iterary trader would not let the finished work alone.  The story, as a work of art, ends with Crusoe’s departure from the island, or at any rate with his return to England.  Its unity is then complete.  But Robinson Crusoe at once became a popular hero, and Defoe was too keen a man of business to miss the chance of further profit from so lucrative a vein.  He did not mind the sneers of hostile critics.  They made merry over the trifling inconsistencies in the tale.  How, for example, they asked, could Crusoe have stuffed his pockets with biscuits when he had taken off all his clothes before swimming to the wreck?  How could he have been at such a loss for clothes after those he had put off were washed away by the rising tide, when he had the ship’s stores to choose from?  How could he have seen the goat’s eyes in the cave when it was pitch dark?  How could the Spaniards give Friday’s father an agreement in writing, when they had neither paper nor ink?  How did Friday come to know so intimately the habits of bears, the bear not being a denizen of the West Indian islands?  On the ground of these and such-like trifles, one critic declared that the book seems calculated for the mob, and will not bear the eye of a rational reader, and that “all but the very canaille are satisfied of the worthlessness of the performance.”  Defoe, we may suppose, was not much moved by these strictures, as edition after edition of the work was demanded.  He corrected one or two little inaccuracies, and at once set about writing a Second Part, and a volume of Serious Reflections which had occurred to Crusoe amidst his adventures.  These were purely commercial excrescences upon the original work.  They were popular enough at the time, but those who are tempted now to accompany Crusoe in his second visit to his island and his enterprising travels in the East, agree that the Second Part is of inferior interest to the first, and very few now read the Serious Reflections.

The Serious Reflections, however, are well worth reading in connexion with the author’s personal history.  In the preface we are told that Robinson Crusoe is an allegory, and in one of the chapters we are told why it is an allegory.  The explanation is given in a homily against the vice of talking falsely.  By talking falsely the moralist explains that he does not mean telling lies, that is, falsehoods concocted with an evil object; these he puts aside as sins altogether beyond the pale of discussion.  But there is a minor vice of falsehood which he considers it his duty to reprove, namely, telling stories, as too many people do, merely to amuse.  “This supplying a story by invention,” he says, “is certainly a most scandalous crime,