ut it seldom is rich in active adventure. We
ask his biographer to tell us what were his habits of composition, how
he talked, how he bore himself in the discharge of his duties to his
family, his neighbors, and himself; what were his beliefs on the great
questions that concern humanity. We desire to know what he said and
wrote, not what he did beyond the study and the domestic or the social
circle. The chief external facts in his career are the dates of the
publication of his successive books.

Daniel Defoe is an exception to this rule. He was a man of action as
well as a man of letters. The writing of the books which have given him
immortality was little more than an accident in his career, a
comparatively trifling and casual item in the total expenditure of his
many-sided energy. He was nearly sixty when he wrote _Robinson Crusoe_.
Before that event he had been a rebel, a merchant, a manufacturer, a
writer of popular satires in verse, a bankrupt; had acted as secretary
to a public commission, been employed in secret services by five
successive Administrations, written innumerable pamphlets, and edited
more than one newspaper. He had led, in fact, as adventurous a life as
any of his own heroes, and had met quickly succeeding difficulties with
equally ready and fertile ingenuity.

For many of the incidents in Defoe's life we are indebted to himself. He
had all the vaingloriousness of exuberant vitality, and was animated in
the recital of his own adventures. Scattered throughout his various
works are the materials for a tolerably complete autobiography. This is
in one respect an advantage for any one who attempts to give an account
of his life. But it has a counterbalancing disadvantage in the
circumstance that there is grave reason to doubt his veracity, Defoe was
a great story-teller in more senses than one. We can hardly believe a
word that he says about himself without independent confirmation.

Defoe was born in London, in 1661. It is a characteristic circumstance
that his name is not his own, except in the sense that it was assumed by
himself. The name of his father, who was a butcher in the parish of St.
Giles, Cripplegate, was Foe. His grandfather was a Northamptonshire
yeoman. In his _True Born Englishman_, Defoe spoke very contemptuously
of families that professed to have come over with "the Norman bastard,"
defying them to prove whether their ancestors were drummers or colonels;
but apparently he was not ab