to write according to his own judgment, guided only by a sense of
gratitude to his benefactor. There is reason to believe that even this
is not the whole truth. Documents which Mr. Lee recently brought to
light make one suspect that Defoe was all the time in private relations
with the leaders of the Whig party. Of this more falls to be said in
another place. The True-Born Englishman was, indeed, dead. Defoe was no
longer the straightforward advocate of King William's policy. He was
engaged henceforward in serving two masters, persuading each that he
served him alone, and persuading the public, in spite of numberless
insinuations, that he served nobody but them and himself, and wrote
simply as a free lance under the jealous sufferance of the Government of
the day.

I must reserve for a separate chapter some account of Defoe's greatest
political work, which he began while he still lay in Newgate, the
_Review_. Another work which he wrote and published at the same period
deserves attention on different grounds. His history of the great storm
of November, 1703, _A Collection of the most remarkable Casualties and
Disasters which happened in the late Dreadfal Tempest, both by Sea and
Land_, may be set down as the first of his works of invention. It is a
most minute and circumstantial record, containing many letters from
eye-witnesses of what happened in their immediate neighbourhood. Defoe
could have seen little of the storm himself from the interior of
Newgate, but it is possible that the letters are genuine, and that he
compiled other details from published accounts. Still, we are justified
in suspecting that his annals of the storm are no more authentic history
than his _Journal of the Plague_, or his _Memoirs of a Cavalier_, and
that for many of the incidents he is equally indebted to his
imagination.