foe was 'a wonderful mixture of
knave and patriot.' The knavery is seen to some extent in his method of
workmanship as a man of letters. In _A True Relation of the Apparition
of one Mrs. Veal[52] the next day after her Death to one Mrs. Bargrave
at Canterbury, 8th September, 1705_ (1706) Defoe's art of mystification
is skilfully practised.

'This relation,' he says in the Preface, 'is matter of fact, and
attended with such circumstances as may induce any reasonable man to
believe it. It was sent by a gentleman, a Justice of Peace at Maidstone,
in Kent, and a very intelligent person, to his friend in London as it is
here worded; which discourse is here attested by a very sober and
understanding gentleman, who had it from his kinswoman who lives in
Canterbury, within a few doors of the house in which the within-named
Mrs. Bargrave lives ... and who positively assured him that the whole
matter as it is related and laid down is really true, and what she
herself had in the same words, as near as may be, from Mrs. Bargrave's
own mouth.'

In addition to this circumstantial statement, the veritable appearance
of the ghostly lady is confirmed by the fact that she wore a scoured
silk gown, newly made up, which, as Mrs. Bargrave told a friend, she
felt and commended. 'Then Mrs. Watson cried out, "you have seen her
indeed, for none knew but Mrs. Veal and myself that the gown was
scoured."' The ghost came chiefly for the purpose of recommending
Drelincourt's volume, _A Christian's Defence Against the Fear of Death_,
then in its third edition. The fourth edition contained Mrs. Bargrave's
story. 'I am unable to say,' Mr. Lee writes, 'when Defoe's "Apparition"
became a necessary appendage to the book; but think, that since the
eleventh edition, to the present time, Drelincourt has never been
published without it.'

When in 1719, at the age of fifty-nine, he produced his first and
greatest work of fiction, _Robinson Crusoe_, he aimed by the constant
reiteration of commonplace details to give a matter-of-fact aspect to
the narrative, and in most of his later novels, with the exception of
_Colonel Jack_ (1722), which he allows to be in part a 'moral romance,'
Defoe boldly maintains that his relations are in every respect true to
biography and to history. To make this more probable he overloads his
pages with a number of business-like statements, and with affairs so
insignificant and sordid that only his genius can save the narrative
f