tanism, with the "Defence of Unlicensed Printing" before
him? Who scoff at Quakerism over the "Journal" of George Fox? Who
shall join with debauched lordlings and fat-witted prelates in
ridicule of Anabaptist levellers and dippers, after rising from the
perusal of "Pilgrim's Progress?" "There were giants in those days."
And foremost amid that band of liberty-loving and God-fearing men,

"The slandered Calvinists of Charles's time,
Who fought, and won it, Freedom's holy fight,"

stands the subject of our sketch, the "Tinker of Elstow." Of his high
merit as an author there is no longer any question. The _Edinburgh
Review_ expressed the common sentiment of the literary world, when it
declared that the two great creative minds of the seventeenth century
were those which produced "Paradise Lost" and the "Pilgrim's
Progress."

DANIEL DEFOE[2]

[Footnote 2: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]

By CLARK RUSSELL

(1661-1731)

[Illustration: Daniel Defoe.]

Daniel Defoe, whose "Robinson Crusoe" remains, at the end of two
centuries, the most popular work of fiction in a literature abounding
in imaginative works of superlative excellence, was born in London in
1661. His father was plain Mr. Foe, a butcher, of St. Giles,
Cripplegate. Though Defoe speaks gratefully and respectfully of his
father, he implies here and there in his writings a pride of birth
which probably did not induce him to talk freely of the parental
calling. He must needs be of Norman extraction, and go back with the
best of those whose family claims he sneers at; and that posterity
might be in no doubt of the antiquity of his descent, he, at the age
of about forty, changed the plain sturdy name of Foe into De Foe; but
the accepted name is as it is spelt in this contribution.

His father wished to make a Dissenting teacher of him, and sent him to
Morton's Academy, in Newington Green. Morton thoroughly grounded him
in knowledge of a practical and useful sort; and Defoe claimed for his
preceptor's system of education that the pupils became masters of the
English tongue. But language is a genius. No teacher could make a
writer of a boy who was without the talent of words. In after years
Defoe appears to have picked up several tongues, as may be judged by
his challenge to John Tutchin, to translate with him any Latin,
French, or Italian author for twenty pounds each book; one sees his
proficiency also in the character he gives of himself