treasury, the marvellous vigour of their administration. He ridiculed
loudly those writers who pretended that we should have no difficulty in
beating them, and filled their papers with dismal stories about the
poverty and depopulation of the country. "Consider the armies that the
French King has raised," cried Defoe, "and the reinforcements and
subsidies he has sent to the King of Spain; does that look like a
depopulated, country and an impoverished exchequer?" It was perhaps a
melancholy fact, but what need to apologise for telling the truth? At
once, of course, a shout was raised against him for want of patriotism;
he was a French pensioner, a Jacobite, a hireling of the Peace-party.
This was the opportunity on which the chuckling paradox-monger had
counted. He protested that he was not drawing a map of the French power
to terrify the English. But, he said, "there are two cheats equally
hurtful to us; the first to terrify us, the last to make us too easy and
consequently too secure; 'tis equally dangerous for us to be terrified
into despair and bullied into more terror of our enemies than we need,
or to be so exalted in conceit of our own force as to undervalue and
contemn the power which we cannot reduce." To blame him for making clear
the greatness of the French power, was to act as if the Romans had
killed the geese in the Capitol for frightening them out of their sleep.
"If I, like an honest Protestant goose, have gaggled too loud of the
French power, and raised the country, the French indeed may have reason
to cut my throat if they could; but 'tis hard my own countrymen, to whom
I have shown their danger, and whom I have endeavoured to wake out of
their sleep, should take offence at the timely discovery."

If we open the first volume, or indeed any volume of the _Review_, at
random, we are almost certain to meet with some electric shock of
paradox designed to arouse the attention of the torpid. In one number we
find the writer, ever daring and alert, setting out with an eulogium on