t of
the day.

I must reserve for a separate chapter some account of Defoe's greatest
political work, which he began while he still lay in Newgate, the
_Review_. Another work which he wrote and published at the same period
deserves attention on different grounds. His history of the great storm
of November, 1703, _A Collection of the most remarkable Casualties and
Disasters which happened in the late Dreadfal Tempest, both by Sea and
Land_, may be set down as the first of his works of invention. It is a
most minute and circumstantial record, containing many letters from
eye-witnesses of what happened in their immediate neighbourhood. Defoe
could have seen little of the storm himself from the interior of
Newgate, but it is possible that the letters are genuine, and that he
compiled other details from published accounts. Still, we are justified
in suspecting that his annals of the storm are no more authentic history
than his _Journal of the Plague_, or his _Memoirs of a Cavalier_, and
that for many of the incidents he is equally indebted to his
imagination.

CHAPTER IV.

THE REVIEW OF THE AFFAIRS OF FRANCE.

It was a bold undertaking for a prisoner in Newgate to engage to furnish
a newspaper written wholly by himself, "purged from the errors and
partiality of news-writers and petty statesmen of all sides." It would,
of course, have been an impossible undertaking if the _Review_ had been,
either in size or in contents, like a newspaper of the present time. The
_Review_ was, in its first stage, a sheet of eight small quarto pages.
After the first two numbers, it was reduced in size to four pages, but a
smaller type was used, so that the amount of matter remained nearly the
same--about equal in bulk to two modern leading articles. At first the
issue was weekly; after four numbers it became bi-weekly, and so
remained for a year.

For the character of the _Review_ it is difficult to find a parallel.
There was nothing like it at the time, and nothing exactly like it has
been attempted since. The nearest approach to it among its predecessors
was the _Observator_, a small weekly journal written by the erratic John
Tutchin, in which passing topics, political and social, were discussed
in dialogues. Personal scandals were a prominent feature in the
_Observator_. Defoe was not insensible to the value of this element to a
popular journal. He knew, he said, that people liked to be amused; and
he supplied this want in a s