fifty-eight years old, feeling the approach of age
and infirmity, and looking about for means to provide for a large
family, that he added the writing of novels to his multifarious
occupations.

There is probably no writer with whose works his life and personality
are more intimately connected. It is impossible to consider the one
separate from the other. Defoe began to write novels as a tradesman, as
a literary hack, and as a reformer. Being dependent on his pen for his
bread, he wrote what was likely to bring in the most immediate return.
He calculated exactly the value and quality of his wares. He gave to
his fictions the same moral object which inspired his own life. His
novels followed naturally on his other labors, and partook of their
character. It was his custom, on the death of any celebrated person, to
write his life immediately, and to send it to the world while public
interest was still fresh. But being often unable to obtain complete or
authentic information concerning the subject of his biography, he
supplemented facts and rumors by plausible inventions. Fiction entered
into his biographies, just as biography afterward entered into his
novels. But in writing the lives of real individuals Defoe recognized
the necessity of impressing his reader with a sense of the truth and
exactitude of the narrative. This effect he attained by the use of a
literary faculty which he possessed in a degree unequalled by any other
writer--that of circumstantial invention. By the multiplication of
small, unimportant details, each one of which is carefully dwelt upon,
and by the insertion of uninteresting personal incidents and moral
reflections, seeming true from their very dulness, he gave to his work
a remarkable verisimilitude. He did not even issue the book under his
own name, but invented an authorship which would attract attention and
credibility. Thus the "History of Charles XII" was announced on the
title-page as "written by a Scot's gentleman in the Swedish service";
and the "Life of Count Patkul" was "written by a Lutheran minister who
assisted him in his last home, and faithfully translated out of a High
Dutch manuscript."[156] The same characteristics appear in all Defoe's
works. He invents freely, giving the most elaborate details to support
his assertions, and attains to an extraordinary degree the art of
"lying like truth." In the "Journal of the Plague Year," Defoe assumed
with his accustomed ease and skill the