wayfarer, (we are all such upon earth,) addressing itself intelligibly and feelingly to the bosoms of all, has silenced, and made almost to be forgotten, the more awful and scarcely less tender beauties of the ’Holy War made by Shaddai upon Diabolus,’ of the same author,—­a romance less happy in its subject, but surely well worthy of a secondary immortality.  But in no instance has this excluding partiality been exerted with more unfairness than against what may be termed the secondary novels or romances of De Foe.

“While all ages and descriptions of people hang delighted over the ‘Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,’ and shall continue to do so, we trust, while the world lasts, how few comparatively will bear to be told that there exist other fictitious narratives by the same writer,—­four of them at least of no inferior interest, except what results from a less felicitous choice of situation!  ‘Roxana.’  ‘Singleton,’ ‘Moll Flanders,’ ‘Colonel Jack,’ are all genuine offspring of the same father.  They bear the veritable impress of De Foe.  An unpractised midwife that would not swear to the nose, lip, forehead, and eye of every one of them!  They are in their way as full of incident, and some of them every bit as romantic; only they want the uninhabited island, and the charm that has bewitched the world, of the striking solitary situation.

“But are there no solitudes out of the cave and the desert? or cannot the heart in the midst of crowds feel frightfully alone?  Singleton on the world of waters, prowling about with pirates less merciful than the creatures of any howling wilderness,—­is he not alone, with the faces of men about him, but without a guide that can conduct him through the mists of educational and habitual ignorance, or a fellow-heart that can interpret to him the new-born yearnings and aspirations of unpractised penitence?  Or when the boy Colonel Jack, in the loneliness of the heart, (the worst solitude,) goes to hide his ill-purchased treasure in the hollow tree by night, and miraculously loses, and miraculously finds it again—­whom hath he there to sympathize with him? or of what sort are his associates?

“The narrative manner of De Foe has a naturalness about it beyond that of any other novel or romance writer.  His fictions have all the air of true stories.  It is impossible to believe, while you are reading them, that a real person is not narrating to you everywhere nothing but what really happened to himself.  To this the extreme homeliness of their style mainly contributes.  We use the word in its best and heartiest sense,—­that which comes home to the reader.  The narrators everywhere are chosen from low life, or have had their origin in it; therefore they tell their own tales, (Mr. Coleridge has anticipated us in this remark,) as persons in their degree are observed to do, with infinite repetition, and an overacted exactness, lest the hearer should not have minded, or have forgotten,