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 features of Defoe's style" says Minto, "is the use of homely language. It is one of the secrets of the confirmed popularity of Robinson Crusoe. His humour consists in the application of very homely language to affairs usually treated with stiff-dignity." Tuckerman calls Defoe, "a man of the people, a writer of plain, vigorous, unembellished English. He continually uses the homely idioms of the street."

Dean Swift, the author of Gulliver's Travels is not a tinker like Bunyan, nor a butcher's son like Defoe. He is far above such writers in the social scale. He yet uses like them, plain, homely, every day English. He is said to have laid down and followed the principle, that "the divine should have nothing to say to the wisest of men that the most uneducated could not understand." He hated all foreign words and reviled those that 'corrupted' the language by introducing them. "He says what he means in the homeliest native English that can be conceived." It is noteworthy that Dr. Johnson should speak as he did of Swift's language and style: "He (Swift) always understands himself and his readers always understand him. The peruser of Swift wants little previous knowlegleknowledge [sic] and it is sufficient that he is acquainted with common words and common things … The great merit of the Tale of the Tub seems to consist in the author's familiarity