Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 7.djvu/111

 DANIEL DEFOE 73 accoutred, with Defoe in their midst and the Earl of Monmouth at their head, guarded the king and queen to a banquet at Whitehall. His prosperity as a hosier ended in 1692, in which year he fled to Bristol, a bankrupt, with debts, according to his own showing, amounting to seventeen thousand pounds. He did not, however, long lie in hiding. In recognition of his services as a pam- phleteer, the post of accountant to the Commissioners of the Glass Duty was given to him. We then find him prospering again. He started a brick-making manufactory at Tilbury, and set up a coach and a pleasure-boat. His pen, more- over, was ceaselessly employed ; the titles of the productions of a single month would more than fill the slender space allotted me. He fought for Non-con- formity till 1698, then broke with the Dissenters because of their practice of occasional conformity, which, he pretends, disgusted him. His argument was, let a man be wholly a Dissenter, or wholly a Churchman. But don't let him go to chapel one Sunday and church the next. He can never be taken seriously, however, in these short flights any more than in his long novels. There is no consistency in his writings, because there is no conscience in his opinions. In his " The Shortest Way with the Dissenters," he faces about, and the man who was at war with Howe, the most eloquent of Non-conformist divines, second only to Jeremy Taylor in richness of thought and splendor of diction, is, on the merits of that piece of irony, accepted by posterity as the foremost champion of Dis- sent. Defoe's loyalty to King William, however, must pass unquestioned. " The True Born Englishman " procured him the notice of the king, whose confidence he claims to have been honored with. His real character as a journalist and publicist grows quickly visible after the death of William III. His genius as a " trimmer " makes sheer irony of his most appealing and eloquent pieces. Swift says of himself that he wrote that reputation might stand him in the room of a title and coach and six ; Defoe flourished his pen as a tradesman, for money. Swift claims to have been the greatest master of irony of his day, nay, to have invented that form of writing. But Defoe surely is his equal, and in "The Shortest Way " out and away his superior. The writer's gravity completely de- ceived the world. When it was known who was the author, the Dissenters were hardly less indignant than the High Churchmen. The satiric recommendations were indeed in the highest degree alarming. The Tory party had approved with complacency while they thought the piece a serious proposal. When they found out Defoe wrote it, they hunted him down and forced him to surrender himself. A hue-and-cry advertisement in the papers while he was a fugitive, survives as one of the best pen-and-ink sketches in the language : " He is a middle-aged, spare man, about forty years old, of a brown complexion and dark brown coloured hair. but wears a wig : a hooked nose, a sharp chin, gray eyes, and a large mole near his mouth." "The Shortest Way" was ordered to be burnt, and Defoe sentenced to pay a fine of 200 marks to Queen Anne, to stand three times in the pillory, to be imprisoned during the queen's pleasure, and to find sureties for his good behavior for seven years.