32 SIR WALTER SCOTT’S CRITICISM

out of sight. Robinson, for example; never hears anything more of his elder
brother, who enters Lockhart’s Dragoons in the beginning of the work, and
who, in any common romance, would certainly have appeared before the
conclusion. We lose sight at once and for ever of the interesting Xury ;
and the whole earlier adventures of our voyager vanish, not to be recalled
to our recollection by the subsequent course of the story. His father—the
good old merchant of Hull—all the other persons who have been originally
active in the drama—vanish from the scene, and appear not again.

Our friend Robinson, thereafter, in the course of his roving and restless
life, is at length thrown upon his desert island—a situation in which, exist-
ing as'a solitary being, he became an example of what the unassisted
onergies of an individual of the human race can perform; and the author
has, with wonderful exactness, described him as acting and thinking pre-
cisely as such a man must have thought and acted in such an extra-
ordinary situation.

Pathos is not De Foe’s general characteristic; he had too little delicacy
of mind: when it comes, it comes uncalled, and is created by the circum-
stances, not sought for by the author. The excess, for instance, of the
natural longing for human society which Crusoe manifests while on board
of the stranded Spanish vessel, by falling into a sort of agony, as he repeated
the words, “Oh, that but one man had been saved !—oh, that there had
been but one!” is in the highest degree pathetic. The agonizing reflections
of the solitary, when he is in danger of being driven to sea in his rash
attempt to circumnavigate his island, are also affecting.

In like manner we may remark, that De Foe’s genius did not approach
the grand or terrific. The battles, which he is fond of describing, are told
with the indifference of an old bucanier, and probably in the very way in
which he may have heard them recited by the actors. His goblins, too, are
generally a commonplace sort of spirits, that bring with them very little of
supernatural terror; and yet the fine incident of the print of the naked foot
on the sand, with Robinson Crusoe’s terrors in consequence, never fails to
leave a powerful impression upon the reader.

The supposed situation of his hero was peculiarly favourable to the cir-
cumstantial style of De Foe. Robinson Crusoe was placed in a condition
where it was natural that the slightest event should make an impression on
him ; and De Foe was not an author who would leave the slightest event
untold. When he mentions that two shoes were driven ashore, and adds
that they were not neighbours, we feel it to be an incident of importance to
the solitary......

The continuation of Robinson Crusoe’s history, after he obtains the society
of his man Friday, is less philosophical than that which turns our thoughts
upon the efforts which a solitary individual may make for extending his
own comforts in the melancholy situation in which he is placed, and upon
the natural reflections suggested by the progress of his own mind. The