g to reach the shore; he was upon his legs, but was
evidently half smothered with the brine; high above his head curled a
horrible billow, as if to engulf him for ever. 'He must be drowned! he
must be drowned!' I almost shrieked, and dropped the book. I soon
snatched it up again, and now my eye lighted on a third picture; again a
shore, but what a sweet and lovely one, and how I wished to be treading
it; there were beautiful shells lying on the smooth white sand, some were
empty like those I had occasionally seen on marble mantelpieces, but out
of others peered the heads and bodies of wondrous crayfish; a wood of
thick green trees skirted the beach and partly shaded it from the rays of
the sun, which shone hot above, while blue waves slightly crested with
foam were gently curling against it; there was a human figure upon the
beach, wild and uncouth, clad in the skins of animals, with a huge cap on
his head, a hatchet at his girdle, and in his hand a gun; his feet and
legs were bare; he stood in an attitude of horror and surprise; his body
was bent far back, and his eyes, which seemed starting out of his head,
were fixed upon a mark on the sand--a large distinct mark--a human
footprint!

"Reader, is it necessary to name the book which now stood open in my
hand, and whose very prints, feeble expounders of its wondrous lines, had
produced within me emotions strange and novel? Scarcely, for it was a
book which has exerted over the minds of Englishmen an influence
certainly greater than any other of modern times, which has been in most
people's hands, and with the contents of which even those who cannot read
are to a certain extent acquainted; a book from which the most luxuriant
and fertile of our modern prose writers have drunk inspiration; a book,
moreover, to which, from the hardy deeds which it narrates, and the
spirit of strange and romantic enterprise which it tends to awaken,
England owes many of her astonishing discoveries both by sea and land,
and no inconsiderable part of her naval glory.

"Hail to thee, spirit of De Foe! What does not my own poor self owe to
thee? England has better bards than either Greece or Rome, yet I could
spare them easier far than De Foe, 'unabashed De Foe,' as the hunchbacked
rhymer styled him."

It was in this manner, he declares, that he "first took to the paths of
knowledge," and when he began his own "autobiography" he must have well
remembered the opening of "Robinson Crusoe":