be attended to. They are all tradesmen who have strayed into unlawful
courses. They have nothing about them of the heroism of sin; their
crimes are not the result of ungovernable passion, or even of antipathy
to conventional restraints; circumstances and not any law-defying bias
of disposition have made them criminals. How is it that the novelist
contrives to make them so interesting? Is it because we are a nation of
shopkeepers, and enjoy following lines of business which are a little
out of our ordinary routine? Or is it simply that he makes us enjoy
their courage and cleverness without thinking of the purposes with which
these qualities are displayed? Defoe takes such delight in tracing their
bold expedients, their dexterous intriguing and manoeuvring, that he
seldom allows us to think of anything but the success or failure of
their enterprises. Our attention is concentrated on the game, and we pay
no heed for the moment to the players or the stakes. Charles Lamb says
of _The Complete English Tradesman_ that "such is the bent of the book
to narrow and to degrade the heart, that if such maxims were as catching
and infectious as those of a licentious cast, which happily is not the
case, had I been living at that time, I certainly should have
recommended to the grand jury of Middlesex, who presented The Fable of
the Bees, to have presented this book of Defoe's in preference, as of a
far more vile and debasing tendency. Yet if Defoe had thrown the
substance of this book into the form of a novel, and shown us a
tradesman rising by the sedulous practice of its maxims from errand-boy
to gigantic capitalist, it would have been hardly less interesting than
his lives of successful thieves and tolerably successful harlots, and
its interest would have been very much of the same kind, the interest of
dexterous adaptation of means to ends."