being gallantly mounted and richly accoutred, were led by the Earl of
Monmouth, now Earl of Peterborough, and attended their Majesties from
Whitehall" to a banquet given by the Lord Mayor and Corporation of the
City. Three years afterwards, on the occasion of the Jacobite plot in
which Lord Preston was the leading figure, he published the first
pamphlet that is known for certain to be his. It is in verse, and is
entitled _A New Discovery of an Old Intrigue, a Satire levelled at
Treachery and Ambition_. In the preface, the author said that "he had
never drawn his pen before," and that he would never write again unless
this effort produced a visible reformation. If we take this literally,
we must suppose that his claim to have been an author eighteen years
before had its origin in his fitful vanity. The literary merits of the
satire, when we compare it with the powerful verse of Dryden's _Absalom
and Achitophel_, to which he refers in the exordium, are not great.
Defoe prided himself upon his verse, and in a catalogue of the Poets in
one of his later pieces assigned himself the special province of
"lampoon." He possibly believed that his clever doggerel was a better
title to immortality than _Robinson Crusoe_. The immediate popular
effect of his satires gave some encouragement to this belief, but they
are comparatively dull reading for posterity. The clever hits at living
City functionaries, indicated by their initials and nicknames, the rough
ridicule and the biting innuendo, were telling in their day, but the
lampoons have perished with their objects. The local celebrity of Sir
Ralph and Sir Peter, Silly Will and Captain Tom the Tailor, has vanished,
and Defoe's hurried and formless lines, incisive as their vivid force
must have been, are not redeemed from dulness for modern readers by the
few bright epigrams with which they are besprinkled.