uch as to excite Defoe's
contempt, he bears testimony to Mr. Morton's excellence as a teacher,
and instances the names of several pupils who did credit to his labours.
In one respect Mr. Morton's system was better than that which then
prevailed at the Universities; all dissertations were written and all
disputations held in English; and hence it resulted, Defoe says, that
his pupils, though they were "not destitute in the languages," were
"made masters of the English tongue, and more of them excelled in that
particular than of any school at that time." Whether Defoe obtained at
Newington the rudiments of all the learning which he afterwards claimed
to be possessed of, we do not know; but the taunt frequently levelled at
him by University men of being an "illiterate fellow" and no scholar,
was one that he bitterly resented, and that drew from him many
protestations and retorts. In 1705, he angrily challenged John Tutchin
"to translate with him any Latin, French, or Italian author, and after
that to retranslate them crosswise for twenty pounds each book;" and he
replied to Swift, who had spoken of him scornfully as "an illiterate
fellow, whose name I forget," that "he had been in his time pretty well
master of five languages, and had not lost them yet, though he wrote no
bill at his door, nor set Latin quotations on the front of the
_Review_." To the end of his days Defoe could not forget this taunt of
want of learning. In one of the papers in _Applebee's Journal_
identified by Mr. Lee (below, Chapter VIII.), he discussed what is to be
understood by "learning," and drew the following sketch of his own
attainments:--

"I remember an Author in the World some years ago, who was generally
upbraided with Ignorance, and called an 'Illiterate Fellow,' by some of
the _Beau-Monde_ of the last Age...."

"I happened to come into this Person's Study once, and I found him busy
translating a Description of the Course of the River Boristhenes, out of
_Bleau's_ Geography, written in _Spanish_. Another Time I found him
translating some Latin Paragraphs out _of Leubinitz Theatri Cometici_,
being a learned Discourse upon Comets; and that I might see whether it
was genuine, I looked on some part of it that he had finished, and found
by it that he understood the Latin very well, and had perfectly taken
the sense of that difficult Author. In short, I found he understood the
_Latin_, the _Spanish_, the _Italian_, and could read the _Greek_, an