personal loss than the famous
Defoe, the author of _Robinson Crusoe_. It brought him to ruin,
and one of his books to the hangman.

It would seem that his _Shortest Way with the Dissenters_ (1702),
which ironically advocated their extermination, was in answer to
a sermon preached at Oxford by Sacheverell in June of the same
year, called _The Political Union_, wherein he alluded to a party
against whom all friends of the Anglican Church "ought to hang
out the bloody flag and banner of defiance." Defoe's pamphlet so
exactly accorded with the sentiments of the High Church party
against the Dissenters that the extent of their applause at first
was only equalled by that of their subsequent fury when the true
author and his true object came to be known. Parliament ordered
the work to be burnt by the hangman, and Defoe was soon
afterwards sentenced to a ruinous fine and imprisonment, and to
three days' punishment in the pillory. It was on this occasion
that he wrote his famous _Hymn to the Pillory_, which he
distributed among the spectators, and from which (as it is
somewhat long) I quote a few of the more striking lines:--

"Hail, Hieroglyphick State machine,
Contrived to punish fancy in;
Men that are men in thee can feel no pain,
And all thy insignificants disdain.

* * * * *

Here by the errors of the town
The fools look out and knaves look on.

* * * * *

Actions receive their tincture from the times,
And, as they change, are virtues made or crimes.
Thou art the State-trap of the Law,
But neither can keep knaves nor honest men in awe.

* * * * *

Thou art no shame to Truth and Honesty,
Nor is the character of such defaced by thee,
Who suffer by oppression's injury.
Shame, like the exhalations of the Sun,
Falls back where first the motion was begun,
And they who for no crime shall on thy brows appear,
Bear less reproach than they who placed them there."

The State-trap of the Law, however, long survived Defoe's hymn to
it, and was unworthily employed against many another great
Englishman before its abolition. That event was delayed till the
first year of Queen Victoria's reign; the House of Lords
defending it, as it defended all other abuses of our old penal
code, when the Commons in 1815 passed a B