The local celebrity of Sir
Ralph and Sir Peter, Silly Will and Captain Tom the Tailor, has vanished,
and Defoe's hurried and formless lines, incisive as their vivid force
must have been, are not redeemed from dulness for modern readers by the
few bright epigrams with which they are besprinkled.

CHAPTER II.

KING WILLIAM'S ADJUTANT.

Defoe's first business catastrophe happened about 1692. He is said to
have temporarily absconded, and to have parleyed with his creditors from
a distance till they agreed to accept a composition. Bristol is named as
having been his place of refuge, and there is a story that he was known
there as the Sunday Gentleman, because he appeared on that day, and that
day only, in fashionable attire, being kept indoors during the rest of
the week by fear of the bailiffs. But he was of too buoyant a
temperament to sink under his misfortune from the sense of having
brought it on himself, and the cloud soon passed away. A man so fertile
in expedients, and ready, according to his own ideal of a thoroughbred
trader, to turn himself to anything, could not long remain unemployed.
He had various business offers, and among others an invitation from some
merchants to settle at Cadiz as a commission agent, "with offers of very
good commissions." But Providence, he tells us, and, we may add, a
shrewd confidence in his own powers, "placed a secret aversion in his
mind to quitting England upon any account, and made him refuse the best
offers of that kind." He stayed at home, "to be concerned with some
eminent persons in proposing ways and means to the Government for
raising money to supply the occasions of the war then newly begun." He
also wrote a vigorous and loyal pamphlet, entitled, _The Englishman's,
Choice and True Interest: in the vigorous prosecution of the war against
France, and serving K. William and Q. Mary, and acknowledging their
right_. As a reward for his literary or his financial services, or for
both, he was appointed, "without the least application" of his own,
Accountant to the Commissioners of the Glass Duty, and held this post
till the duty was abolished in 1699.

From 1694 to the end of William's reign was the most prosperous and
honourable period in Defoe's life. His services to the Government did
not absorb the whole of his restless energy; He still had time for
private enterprise, and started a manufactory of bricks and pantiles at
Tilbury, where, Mr. Lee says, judging from f