86 < BY W. CALDWELL ROSCOE.

rather bore us in other novels, are all to the purpose; for there is a real
point in putting such a story in the mouth of the sufferer, and in giving us
for the time an illusory belief in his reality. When we add that the whole
book shows the freshness of a writer employed on his first novel—though at
the mature age of fifty-eight—seeing in it an allegory of his own experiences
embodied in the scenes which most interested his imagination, we see some
reasons why “ Robinson Crusoe” should hold a distinct rank by itself
amongst his works.

To have pleased all the boys in Europe for nearly a hundred and fifty years
is, after all, a remarkable feat.

This, indeed, is the best panegyric that can be pronounced upon De Foe’s
most celebrated fiction. It has been unapproached for a century and a half
as a boy’s book, and still holds its own in the face of a thousand competitors.
Of all its imitators, “ The Swiss Family Robinson” alone has drawn near to
it in popularity, though the two, so far as their literary character is con-
cerned, remain separated longo intervallo,

The following able estimate, by William Caldwell Roscoe,* will probably
be new to most of my readers :—

FROM W. CALDWELL ROSCOE,

It would be to impugn the verdict of all mankind to say that “ Robinson
Crusoe” was not a great work of genius. It is a work of genius—a most
remarkable one—but of a low order of genius. The universal admiration it
has obtained may be the admiration of men; but it is founded on the liking
of boys. Few educated men or women would care to read it for the first
time after the age of five-and-twenty. Even Lamb could say it only “ holds
its place by tough prescription.” The boy revels in it. It furnishes him
with food for his imagination in the very direction in which, of all others, it
loves to occupy itself. It is not that he cares for Robinson Crusoe—that
dull, ingenious, seafaring creature, with his strange mixture of cowardice
and boldness, his unleavened, coarsely sagacious, mechanic nature, his keen
trade-instincts, and his rude religious experiences. The boy becomes his
own Robinson Crusoe. It is little Tom Smith himself, curled up in a
remote corner of the playground, who makes those troublesome voyages on
the raft, and rejoices over the goods he saves from the wreck; who contrives
his palisades and twisted cables to protect his cave; clothes himself so
quaintly in goat skins; is terrified at the savages; and rejoices in his
jurisdiction over the docile Friday, who, he thinks, would be better than a
dog, and almost as good as a pony. He does not care a farthing about
Crusoe as a separate person from himself. This is one reason why he
rejects the religious reflections as a strange and undesirable element in a
work otherwise so fascinating. He cannot enter into Crusoe’s sense of

* W. Caldwell Roscoe, ‘‘ Poems and Essays,” ii. 237, 238.