DANIEL DE FOE:
A Biographn.

CHAPTER 1.

HIS EARLY YEARS.

   

There is a man alive, he says, and well known
too, the aenore of whose life are the first subject of these volumes,
and to whom all or most part of the story most directly alludes ;
this, he adds, may be depended upon for truth. In a word,
there’s not a circumstance in the imaginary story but has its just allusion to
a real story, and chimes part for part, and step for step, with the inimitable
“ Life of Robinson Crusoe.”

Notwithstanding this assertion, I am inclined to think that much of the
pretended allegory was an after-thought of De Foe’s, and that between his
active career and that of the solitary in the wave-washed island there exists
no more resemblance than between Macedon and Monmouth in Fluellen’s
famous comparison. We may see, perhaps, some degree of likeness in the
loneliness of De Foe in the-world which he buffeted so stoutly, and the caged
condition of the castaway may remind us of his creator’s imprisonment ; but
we refuse to carry the allegory any further, or to identify every incident in
the romance with every event in the real life. For the rest, De Foe was a
greater, a braver, and a more self-controlled man than “ Robinson Crusoe,”
as the following brief biographical sketch will, I hope, abundantly prove.

Daniel Defoe, or De Foe, was born in the parish of St. Giles, Cripplegate
in 1660; the son of James Foe, citizen and butcher, of London; and the