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,