Mr. Lee has given satisfactory reasons for believing that Defoe did not,
as some of his biographers have supposed, die in actual distress.
Ropemaker's Alley in Moorfields was a highly respectable street at the
beginning of last century; a lodging there was far from squalid. The
probability is that Defoe subsisted on his pension from the Government
during his last two years of wandering; and suffering though he was from
the infirmities of age, yet wandering was less of a hardship than it
would have been to other men, to one who had been a wanderer for the
greater part of his life. At the best it was a painful and dreary ending
for so vigorous a life, and unless we pitilessly regard it as a
retribution for his moral defects, it is some comfort to think that the
old man's infirmities and anxieties were not aggravated by the pressure
of hopeless and helpless poverty. Nor do I think that he was as
distressed as he represented to his son-in-law by apprehensions of ruin
to his family after his death, and suspicions of the honesty of his
son's intentions. There is a half insane tone about his letter to Mr.
Baker, but a certain method may be discerned in its incoherencies. My
own reading of it is that it was a clever evasion of his son-in-law's
attempts to make sure of his share of the inheritance. We have seen how
shifty Defoe was in the original bargaining about his daughter's
portion, and we know from his novels what his views were about
fortune-hunters, and with what delight he dwelt upon the arts of
outwitting them. He probably considered that his youngest daughter was
sufficiently provided for by her marriage, and he had set his heart upon
making provision for her unmarried sisters. The letter seems to me to be
evidence, not so much of fears for their future welfare, as of a
resolution to leave them as much as he could. Two little circumstances
seem to show that, in spite of his professions of affection, there was a
coolness between Defoe and his son-in-law. He wrote only the prospectus
and the first article for Baker's paper, the _Universal Spectator_, and