xvi MEMOIR OF DE FOE.

to this happy faculty, this unforced power, that De Foe occasionally
rises, 2s in many instances in the golden volume now offered to the
reader, almost to the sublime. In his picture of the despair of
Crusoe, we have, in. words intelligible even to infancy, a wondrous
delineation of the soul of man in a most trying and most terrible
hour. De Foe is, in the most emphatic sense of the word, an Eng-
lish writer. Cobbett has been compared to him; and in many of
the minor parts of authorship there is, certainly, a similitude; but
Cobbett was singularly deficient of imagination, the power which
gave a color and a beauty to all that De Foe touched, even though
of the homeliest and most unpromising materia's,