st, or skimming over the tops of the maddening
waves--'Mercy upon him! he must be drowned!' I exclaimed, as my eyes
fell upon a poor wretch who appeared to be striving to reach the shore;
he was upon his legs, but was evidently half smothered with the brine;
high above his head curled a horrible billow, as if to engulf him for
ever. 'He must be drowned! he must be drowned!' I almost shrieked, and
dropped the book. I soon snatched it up again, and now my eye lighted on
a third picture: again a shore, but what a sweet and lovely one, and how
I wished to be treading it; there were beautiful shells lying on the
smooth white sand, some were empty like those I had occasionally seen on
marble mantelpieces, but out of others peered the heads and bodies of
wondrous crayfish, a wood of thick green trees skirted the beach and
partly shaded it from the rays of the sun, which shone hot above, while
blue waves slightly crested with foam were gently curling against it;
there was a human figure upon the beach, wild and uncouth, clad in the
skins of animals, with a huge cap on his head, a hatchet at his girdle,
and in his hand a gun; his feet and legs were bare; he stood in an
attitude of horror and surprise; his body was bent far back, and his
eyes, which seemed starting out of his head, were fixed upon a mark on
the sand--a large distinct mark--a human footprint. . . .

Reader, is it necessary to name the book which now stood open in my hand,
and whose very prints, feeble expounders of its wondrous lines, had
produced within me emotions strange and novel? Scarcely--for it was a
book which has exerted over the minds of Englishmen an influence
certainly greater than any other of modern times--which has been in most
people's hands, and with the contents of which even those who cannot read
are to a certain extent acquainted--a book from which the most luxuriant
and fertile of our modern prose writers have drunk inspiration--a book,
moreover, to which, from the hardy deeds which it narrates, and the
spirit of strange and romantic enterprise which it tends to awaken,
England owes many of her astonishing discoveries both by sea and land,
and no inconsiderable part of her naval glory.

Hail to thee, spirit of De Foe! What does not my own poor self owe to
thee? England has better bards than either Greece or Rome, yet I could
spare them easier far than De Foe, 'unabashed De Foe,' as the hunchbacked
rhymer styled him.

The true chord ha