"Memento Mori here I stand,
With silent lips but speaking hand;
A walking shadow of a Poet,
But bound to hold my tongue and never show it.
A monument of injury,
A sacrifice to legal t(yrann)y."

"For shame, gentlemen," he humorously cries to his enemies, "do not
strike a dead man; beware, scribblers, of fathering your pasquinades
against authority upon me; for seven years the True-Born Englishman is
tied under sureties and penalties not to write."

"To seven long years of silence I betake,
Perhaps by then I may forget to speak."

This elegy he has been permitted to publish as his last speech and dying
confession--

"When malefactors come to die
They claim uncommon liberty:
Freedom of speech gives no distaste,
They let them talk at large, because they talk their last."

The public could hardly have supposed from this what Defoe afterwards
admitted to have been the true state of the case, namely, that on
leaving prison he was taken into the service of the Government. He
obtained an appointment, that is to say a pension, from the Queen, and
was employed on secret services. When charged afterwards with having
written by Harley's instructions, he denied this, but admitted the
existence of certain "capitulations," in which he stipulated for liberty