it is lamentable that works of powers and perceptions so supreme as
"Moll Flanders" and "Colonel Jack" should be found unfit and
unreadable, infinitely more perilous to the young than the coarser,
but honester, freedoms of Smollett and Fielding, because of Defoe's
base tradesman-like trick of representing in colors as tempting as
possible the sins which with formal, pulpitic, hypocritical gravity he
entreats you to avoid. "Robinson Crusoe" is wholesome: one can see
one's daughter with that book in her hand and feel easy. Yet it has
not the strength nor the art of "Roxana," "Colonel Jack," and "Moll
Flanders." In fact, it may be said that when Defoe set about to write
this book he had no thoughts whatever of art in his head. He was to
relate what happened to a castaway, and the skill shown is that of a
sailor who writes up his log-book. No one could have been more
astonished by the success of the book than Defoe himself. He afterward
went to work to communicate a needless significance to the narrative,
whose charm is its eternal grace of freshness and simplicity, by
writing the "Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe," in which he
would have us believe that Crusoe's story is an allegory based on
Defoe's own life. This is accepted by some even in our own time. It is
easy to understand that Defoe should lose no opportunity to recommend
his works by every species of advertisement; no man could lie in a
literary sense with more self-complacency, and a clearer conception of
the business value of the falsehood; but it is wonderful to find
people choosing to travesty the palpably obvious, sooner than accept
the plain truth as it lies naked on the face of the printed page.

But if Defoe had never written a line of "Robinson Crusoe," we should
know him to be a great genius and a fine artist by the opening pages
of "Colonel Jack." All about the lives of the three boys, their
sleeping in glass houses, their picking of pockets, the loss of the
money in the hollow tree, and then the recovery of it, is in its kind
matchless in fiction. Wonderfully fine too are many of the touches in
"Moll Flanders": the whole story of her descent from the honesty of a
simple serving-maid to the horrors of Newgate and transportation, is
so masterful, the art is so consummate, the impersonation by Defoe of
the character of a subtle trollop full of roguish moralizings and thin
sentimentalities, is so extraordinary, that one can never cease to
deplore tha