much time cribbed out of the Company--and I am but just got out of the
thick of a Tea Sale, in which most of the Entry of Notes, deposits &c.
usually falls to my share. Dodwell is willing, but alas! slow. To
compare a pile of my notes with his little hillock (which has been as
long a building), what is it but to compare Olympus with a mole-hill.
Then Wadd is a sad shuffler.--

I have nothing of Defoe's but two or three Novels, and the Plague
History. I can give you no information about him. As a slight general
character of what I remember of them (for I have not look'd into them
latterly) I would say that "in the appearance of _truth_ in all the
incidents and conversations that occur in them they exceed any works of
fiction I am acquainted with. It is perfect illusion. The _Author_ never
appears in these self-narratives (for so they ought to be called or
rather Autobiographies) but the _narrator_ chains us down to an implicet
belief in every thing he says. There is all the minute detail of a
log-book in it. Dates are painfully pressed upon the memory. Facts are
repeated over and over in varying phrases, till you cannot chuse but
believe them. It is like reading Evidence given in a Court of Justice.
So anxious the story-teller seems, that the truth should be clearly
comprehended, that when he has told us a matter of fact, or a motive, in
a line or two farther down he _repeats_ it with his favorite figure of
speech, 'I say' so and so,--though he had made it abundantly plain
before. This is in imitation of the common people's way of speaking, or
rather of the way in which they are addressed by a master or mistress,
who wishes to impress something upon their memories; and has a wonderful
effect upon matter-of-fact readers. Indeed it is to such principally
that he writes. His style is elsewhere beautiful, but plain _& homely_.
Robinson Crusoe is delightful to all ranks and classes, but it is easy
to see that it is written in phraseology peculiarly adapted to the lower