12 DE FOE AS A POLITICIAN.

the intervals of our leisure, and they are seldom of that order on which the
safety of an empire depends. But in De Foe’s time it was quite otherwise.
He who plunged into the raging strife was compelled to throw aside every
impediment, and to fight, if he fought at all, with arms and hands unen-
cumbered. The seven years of his apprenticeship had been seven most
eventful years, and De Foe, with his far-seeing sagacity, could not but
rightly estimate the importance of the issue. He was too courageous and
too wise to fear that issue. As Mr. Forster eloquently and truly says, hope
would brighten in his sensible, manly heart, when it most deserted weaker
men’s. When the King, alarmed at last for the safety of the crown he dis-
honoured, flung off his licentious negligence for crueller enjoyments; when
the street ballads and lampoons against his shameless court grew daily
bitterer and more daring; when a Sidney and a Russell were brought to the
block for advocating such a measure of liberty as would now-a-days be con-
sidered moderate by the most slavish partisan of Cesarism ; no alarm was
likely to depress De Foe’s clear, calm, and unshaken intellect. And the end
of that Saturnalia of license and shame, of foul cruelty, of fouller luxurious-
ness, of tyranny at home and disgrace abroad, which we call the reign of
Charles II., came at length—Charles II. was dead, and caps were thrown in
the air for James II.

This is not the place for an historical summary, and yet in the history ot
his time De Foe played so prominent a part that an occasional glance at its
leading events must be permitted us. The intentions of James II. he fully
understood and appreciated. He saw that he aimed at the establishment of
Popery as his end in religion, and the absolutism of the Crown as the goal
of his policy. He heard bishops preach of the divine right and infallibility
of Kings; he heard it publicly asserted, that if the King commanded his
head, and sent his messengers to fetch it, he was bound to submit, and stand
still while it was cut off. We need not wonder that, under such circum-
stances, De Foe gladly hailed the so-called rebellion of the Duke of Mon-
mouth as affording a prospect of deliverance for his country. Its religion and
its freedom seemed to him to be intimately bound up with the success of the
Duke’s expedition; and mounting his horse, he rode away to enlist under
his standard. He was with the invaders at Bath and Bristol; but—how or
why I know not—he was absent from the great fight at Sedgemoor, when
the King’s cause was so nearly lost. On learning of Monmouth’s disastrous
defeat, he would seem to have gained the sea-shore and taken ship to the
Continent. With his usual energy he turned his self-banishment to advan-
tage, traversing Spain, and Germany, and France, and gathering a vast fund
of experience and information, which in due time proved to him of the
highest value.

It was probably in the following year that he returned to Freeman’s
Court, Cornhill. Thenceforth he wrote himself De Foe. Whether, says
Mr. Forster, the change was a piece of innocent vanity picked up in his