letter he speaks of a perjured, contemptible enemy as the cause of his misfortunes.  Mr. Lee conjectures that this was Mist, that Mist had succeeded in embroiling him with the Government by convincing them of treachery in his secret services, and that this was the hue and cry from which he fled.  But it is hardly conceivable that the Government could have listened to charges brought by a man whom they had driven from the country for his seditious practices.  It is much more likely that Mist and his supporters had sufficient interest to instigate the revival of old pecuniary claims against Defoe.

It would have been open to suppose that the fears which made the old man a homeless wanderer and fugitive for the last two years of his life, were wholly imaginary, but for the circumstances of his death.  He died of a lethargy on the 26th of April, 1731, at a lodging in Ropemaker’s Alley, Moorfields.  In September, 1733, as the books in Doctors’ Commons show, letters of administration on his goods and chattels were granted to Mary Brooks, widow, a creditrix, after summoning in official form the next of kin to appear.  Now, if Defoe had been driven from his home by imaginary fears, and had baffled with the cunning of insane suspicion the efforts of his family to bring him back, there is no apparent reason why they should not have claimed his effects after his death.  He could not have died unknown to them, for place and time were recorded in the newspapers.  His letter to his son-in-law, expressing the warmest affection for all his family except his son, is sufficient to prevent the horrible notion that he might have been driven forth like Lear by his undutiful children after he had parted his goods among them.  If they had been capable of such unnatural conduct, they would not have failed to secure his remaining property.  Why, then, were his goods and chattels left to a creditrix?  Mr. Lee ingeniously suggests that Mary Brooks was the keeper of the lodging where he died, and that she kept his personal property to pay rent and perhaps funeral expenses.  A much simpler explanation, which covers most of the known facts without casting any unwarranted reflections upon Defoe’s children, is that when his last illness overtook him he was still keeping out of the way of his creditors, and that everything belonging to him in his own name was legally seized.  But there are doubts and difficulties attending any explanation.

Mr. Lee has given satisfactory reasons for believing that Defoe did not, as some of his biographers have supposed, die in actual distress.  Ropemaker’s Alley in Moorfields was a highly respectable street at the beginning of last century; a lodging there was far from squalid.  The probability is that Defoe subsisted on his pension from the Government during his last two years of wandering; and suffering though he was from the infirmities of age, yet wandering was less of a hardship than it would have been to other men, to one who had been a wanderer for the