a4 CRITICISMS ON ‘“ ROBINSON CRUSOE.”

FROM ROUS

 

EAU.

Since we must have books, this is one which, in my opinion, is a most
excellent treatise on natural education. This is the first my Emilius shall
read; his whole library shall long consist of this work only, which shall
preserve an eminent rank to the very Jast. It shall be the text to which all
our conversations on natural science are to serve only as a comment. It
shall bea guide during our progress to maturity of judgment; and ao long
as our taste is not adulterated, the perusal of this book will afford us
pleasure. And what surprising book is this? Is if Aristotle? is it Pliny?
is it Buffon? No; it is * Robinson Crusoe.” The value and importance of the
various arts are ordinarily estimated, not according to their real utility, but
by the gratification which they administer to the fantastic desires of man-
kind. But Emilius shall be taught to view them in a different light:
* Robinson Crusoe ” shall teach him to value the stock of an ironmonger above
that of the most magnificent toy shop in Europe.

My third quotation is less extravagant in its eulogy, and therefore more
discriminating.* I believe it, moreover, to approach much nearer to a true
estimate of De Foe’s real merits. It is taken from a very able article on “ De

foe's Novels,” in the seventeenth volume of the “ Cornhill Magazine: —

FROM THE “ CORNHILL MAGAZINE,”

The horrors of abandonment on a desert island can be appreciated hy the
simplest sailor or schoolboy. The main thing is to bring out the situation
plainly and forcibly, to tell us of the difficulties of making pots and pans, of
eatching goats, and sowing corn, and of avoiding audacious cannibals. This
task De Foe performs with unequalled spirit and vivacity. In his first dis-
covery of a new art he shows the freshness so offen conspicuous in first
novels. The scenery w

 

 

just that which had peculiar charms for his fancy;
it was one of those half-true legends of which he had heard strange stories
from seafaring men, and possibly from the acquaintances of his hero himself.
dle brings out the shrewd, vigorous character of the Englishman thrown
upon his own resources, with evident enjoyment of his task. Indeed, De
Poe tells us himself that in Robinson Crusoe he saw a kind of allegory of his
own fate. He had suffered from solitude of soul. Confinement in his
prison is represented in the hook by confinement in an island; and even
particular incidents, such as the fright he receives one night from something
in his bed, “was word for word a history of what happened.” In other
words. this novel too, like many of the best ever written, has in if something
of the autobiographical element, which makes a man speak from greater
depths of feeling than in a purely imaginary story.

It would indeed be easy to show that the story, though in one sense

* We have considerably abridged the original