ay the author's main purpose
in writing it. It shows considerable imagination, wit, and skill
in latinity, but it has not enough of verisimilitude to make it an
effective satire, and does not always avoid scurrility."{1} Like
Neville's production, the satire was misinterpreted.

The title of Neville's tract also recalls the lost play of Thomas
Nash--"The Isle of Dogs"--for which he was imprisoned on its appearance
in 1597, and suffered, as he asserted, for the indiscretion of others.
"As Actaeon was worried by his own hounds," wrote Francis Meres in his
"Palladis Tamia," "so is Tom Nash of his Isle of Dogs." And three
years later, in 1600, Nash referred in his "Summers Last Will" to the
excitement raised by his suppressed play. "Here's a coil about dogs
without wit! If I had thought the ship of fools would have stay'd to
take in fresh water at the Isle of Dogs, I would have furnish'd it with
a whole kennel of collections to the purpose." The incident was long
remembered. Nine years after Nash's experience John Day published his
"Isle of Gulls," drawn from Sir Philip Sidney's "Arcadia."{2}

1 Dictionary of National Biography, xxiv. 76.

2 I take these facts from Sir Sidney Lee's sketch of Nash in
the Dictionary of National Biography, XL. 107.

[48]

DEFOE AND THE "ISLE OF PINES"

I would apologize for taking so much time on a nine-page hoax did it not
offer something positive in the history of English literature. It has
long been recognized as one of the more than possible sources of Defoe's
"Robinson Crusoe." It is truly said that the elements of a masterpiece
exist for years before they become embodied, that they are floating in
the air, as it were, awaiting the master workman who can make that
use which gives to them permanent interest Life on an island, entirely
separated from the rest of mankind, had formed an incident in many
tales, but Neville's is believed to have been the first employment by
an English author of island life for the whole story. And while Defoe
excludes the most important feature of Neville's tract--woman--from his
"Robinson Crusoe," issued in April, 1719, he too, four months after,
published the "Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe," in which
woman has a share. It would be wearisome to undertake a comparison of
incident; suffice it to say that the "Isle of Pines" has been accepted
as a pre-Defoe romance, to which the far greater Englishman may have
been indebted. [4