rom being wearisome. To inculcate morality he carries his readers into
the worst dens of vice--his heroes being pickpockets, pirates, and
convicts, and his heroines depraved women of the lowest order. The
interest felt in _Captain Singleton_ (1720), in _Moll Flanders_ (1722),
in _Colonel Jack_ (1722), and in _Roxana_ (1724), is to be found in the
minute record of their shameless adventures, their miseries and vices.
When the characters reform, Defoe's occupation is gone. The atmosphere
the reader is forced to breathe in these tales is indeed so oppressive
that he will be glad to escape from it into the pure and exhilarating
air of a Shakespeare or a Scott.

A critic has asserted that as models of fictitious narrative these tales
are supreme, but it is impossible to agree with this judgment. The
highest imaginative art is not deceptive art. The fact that Lord Chatham
thought the _Memoirs of a Cavalier_[53] (1720) a true history, is not to
the credit of the work as fiction. As well, it has been said, might you
claim the highest genius for the painter, whose fruit and flowers were
so deceptively painted as to tempt birds to peck at the canvas.

Whatever interest the reader feels in Defoe's 'secondary novels,' of
which _Roxana_ is the most powerful, is due to scenes which disgust as
much as they impress. The vividness with which they are depicted is
undeniable, but one does not desire to inspect filth with a microscope.
Happily _Robinson Crusoe_, on which the author's fame rests, is a
thoroughly healthy book that still holds its place as the best, or one
of the best, volumes ever written for boys. There is genius as well as
extraordinary skill in the way this admirable story is told, but it is
not among the fictions which are read with as much pleasure in old age
as in youth. Defoe's amazing gift of invention does not compensate for
the want of a creative and elevating imagination.

_The History of the Plague in London_ (1722) stands next to _Robinson
Crusoe_ in literary merit. Had Defoe been a witness, as he pretends to
have been, of the scenes which he describes, the record could not be
more vivid. It professes to have been 'written by a citizen who
continued all the while in London,' and 'lived without Aldgate Church
and Whitechapel Bars, on the left hand or north side of the street.' In
this case, as in others, the circumstantial character of the narrative
led readers to regard it as a true history, and Dr. Mead, in hi