udes,--

"Tell them the men who placed him here
Are friends unto the times,
But at a loss to find his guile
They can't commit his crimes."

Defoe seems to have thoroughly imbibed the ascetic spirit of his
brethren. He was fond of denouncing social as well as political
vanities. The "Comical Pilgrim" contains a considerable amount of coarse
humour, and in one place the supposed cynic inveighs against the drama,
and describes the audience at a theatre--

"The audience in the upper gallery is composed of lawyers, clerks,
valets-de-chambre, exchange girls, chambermaids, and skip-kennels, who
at the last act are let in gratis in favour to their masters being
benefactors to the devil's servants. The middle gallery is taken up by
the middling sort of people, as citizens, their wives and daughters, and
other jilts. The boxes are filled with lords and ladies, who give money
to see their follies exposed by fellows as wicked as themselves. And the
pit, which lively represents the pit of hell, is crammed with those
insignificant animals called beaux, whose character nothing but wonder
and shame can compose; for a modern beau, you must know, is a pretty,
neat, fantastic outside of a man, a well-digested bundle of costly
vanities, and you may call him a volume of methodical errata bound in a
gilt cover. He's a curiously wrought cabinet full of shells and other
trumpery, which were much better quite empty than so emptily filled.
He's a man's skin full of profaneness, a paradise full of weeds, a
heaven full of devils, a Satan's bedchamber hung with arras of God's own
making. He can be thought no better than a Promethean man; at best but a
lump of animated dust kneaded into human shape, and if he has only such
a thing as a soul it seems to be patched up with more vices than are
patches in a poor Spaniard's coat. His general employment is to scorn
all business, but the study of the modes and vices of the times, and you
may look upon him as upon the painted sign of a man hung up in the air,
only to be tossed to and fro with every wind of temptation and vanity."

It would appear that servants had in his day many of the faults which
characterise some of them at present. In "Everybody's Business is
Nobody's Business" we have an amusing picture of the over-dressed maid
of the period.

"The apparel," he says, "of our women-servants should be next regulated,
that we may know the mistress from the maid. I remember I was once put
v