“The Lord Provost, after some difficulty, yielded; though it was alleged, that it was what never was known in Edinburgh before.  About one o’clock in the morning a battalion of the guards entered the town, marched up to the Parliament Close, and took post in all the avenues of the city, which prevented the resolutions taken to insult the houses of the rest of the treaters.  The rabble were entirely reduced by this, and gradually dispersed, and so the tumult ended.”

Although Defoe did all he could to bring the Union about he felt for and with the poor distracted people.  He saw that amid the strife of parties, proud, ignorant, mistaken, it may be, the people were still swayed by love of country, love of freedom.

Even after the Union was accomplished Defoe remained in Scotland.  He still wrote his Review every week, and filled it so full of Union matters that his readers began to think he could speak of nothing else and that he was grown dull.  In his Review he wrote:—­

“Nothing but Union, Union, says one now that wants diversion; I am quite tired of it, and we hope, ’tis as good as over now.  Prithee, good Mr. Review, let’s have now and then a touch of something else to make us merry.”  But Defoe assures his readers he means to go on writing about the Union until he can see some prospect of calm among the men who are trying to make dispeace.  “Then I shall be the first that shall cease calling upon them to Peace.”

The years went on, Defoe always living a stormy life amid the clash of party politics, always writing, writing.  More than once his noisy, journalistic pen brought him to prison.  But he was never a prisoner long, never long silenced.  Yet although Defoe wrote so much and lived at a time when England was full of witty writers he was outside the charmed circle of wits who pretended not to know of his existence.  “One of these authors,” says another writer, “(the fellow that was pilloried, I have forgotten his name), is indeed so grave, sententious, dogmatical a rogue that there is no enduring him."*

Johnathan Swift.

At length when Defoe was nearly sixty years old he wrote the book which has brought him world-wide and enduring fame.  Need I tell you of that book?  Surely not.  For who does not know Robinson Crusoe, or, as the first title ran, “The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner, who lived eight-and-twenty years all alone in an uninhabited Island on the Coast of America near the Mouth of the great River Oroonoque, having been cast on shore by shipwreck, wherein all the men perished but himself.  With an account how he was at last strangely delivered by Pirates.  Written by himself.”  In those days, you see, they were not afraid of long titles.  The book, too, is long.  “Yet,” as another great writer says,* “was there ever anything written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers, except Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and the Pilgrim’s Progress?”