This son does not appear in a favourable light in the troubles which soon after fell upon Defoe, when Mist discovered his connexion with the Government.  Foiled in his assault upon him, Mist seems to have taken revenge by spreading the fact abroad, and all Defoe’s indignant denials and outcries against Mist’s ingratitude do not seem to have cleared him from suspicion.  Thenceforth the printers and editors of journals held aloof from him.  Such is Mr. Lee’s fair interpretation of the fact that his connexion with Applebee’s Journal terminated abruptly in March, 1726, and that he is found soon after, in the preface to a pamphlet on Street Robberies, complaining that none of the journals will accept his communications.  “Assure yourself, gentle reader,” he says,[7] “I had not published my project in this pamphlet, could I have got it inserted in any of the journals without feeing the journalists or publishers.  I cannot but have the vanity to think they might as well have inserted what I send them, gratis, as many things I have since seen in their papers.  But I have not only had the mortification to find what I sent rejected, but to lose my originals, not having taken copies of what I wrote.”  In this preface Defoe makes touching allusion to his age and infirmities.  He begs his readers to “excuse the vanity of an over-officious old man, if, like Cato, he inquires whether or no before he goes hence and is no more, he can yet do anything for the service of his country.”  “The old man cannot trouble you long; take, then, in good part his best intentions, and impute his defects to age and weakness.”

[Footnote 7:  Lee’s Life, vol. i. p. 418.]

This preface was written in 1728; what happened to Defoe in the following year is much more difficult to understand, and is greatly complicated by a long letter of his own which has been preserved.  Something had occurred, or was imagined by him to have occurred, which compelled him to fly from his home and go into hiding.  He was at work on a book to be entitled The Complete English Gentleman.  Part of it was already in type when he broke off abruptly in September, 1729, and fled.  In August, 1730, he sent from a hiding-place, cautiously described as being about two miles from Greenwich, a letter to his son-in-law, Baker, which is our only clue to what had taken place.  It is so incoherent as to suggest that the old man’s prolonged toils and anxieties had at last shaken his reason, though not his indomitable self-reliance.  Baker apparently had written complaining that he was debarred from seeing him.  “Depend upon my sincerity for this,” Defoe answers, “that I am far from debarring you.  On the contrary, it would be a greater comfort to me than any I now enjoy that I could have your agreeable visits with safety, and could see both you and my dear Sophia, could it be without giving her the grief of seeing her father in tenebris, and under the load of insupportable sorrows.”  He gives a touching description of the griefs which are preying upon his mind.