THE LIFE OF

_DANIEL DE FOE_.



Daniel De Foe was descended from a respectable family in the county of
Northampton, and born in London, about the year 1663. His father, James
Foe, was a butcher, in the parish of St. Giles's, Cripplegate, and a
protestant dissenter. Why the subject of this memoir prefixed the _De_
to his family name cannot now be ascertained, nor did he at any period
of his life think it necessary to give his reasons to the public. The
political scribblers of the day, however, thought proper to remedy this
lack of information, and accused him of possessing so little of the
_amor patriae_, as to make the addition in order that he might not be
taken for an Englishman; though this idea could have had no other
foundation than the circumstance of his having, in consequence of his
zeal for King William, attacked the prejudices of his countrymen in his
"Trueborn Englishman."

After receiving a good education at an academy at Newington, young De
Foe, before he had attained his twenty-first year, commenced his career
as an author, by writing a pamphlet against a very prevailing sentiment
in favour of the Turks, who were at that time laying siege to Vienna.
This production, being very inferior to those of his maturer years, was
very little read, and the indignant author, despairing of success with
his pen, had recourse to the sword; or, as he termed it, when boasting
of the exploit in his latter years, "displayed his attachment to liberty
and protestanism," by joining the ill-advised insurrection under the