having fine feathers, the prizes of the ministry in London were
generally given to strangers, "eminent ministers _called_ from all parts
of England," some even from Scotland, finding acceptance in the
metropolis before having received any formal ordination.

Though the education of his "fund-bred" companions, as he calls them, at
Mr. Morton's Academy in Newington Green, was such as to excite Defoe's
contempt, he bears testimony to Mr. Morton's excellence as a teacher,
and instances the names of several pupils who did credit to his labours.
In one respect Mr. Morton's system was better than that which then
prevailed at the Universities; all dissertations were written and all
disputations held in English; and hence it resulted, Defoe says, that
his pupils, though they were "not destitute in the languages," were
"made masters of the English tongue, and more of them excelled in that
particular than of any school at that time." Whether Defoe obtained at
Newington the rudiments of all the learning which he afterwards claimed
to be possessed of, we do not know; but the taunt frequently levelled at
him by University men of being an "illiterate fellow" and no scholar,
was one that he bitterly resented, and that drew from him many
protestations and retorts. In 1705, he angrily challenged John Tutchin
"to translate with him any Latin, French, or Italian author, and after
that to retranslate them crosswise for twenty pounds each book;" and he
replied to Swift, who had spoken of him scornfully as "an illiterate
fellow, whose name I forget," that "he had been in his time pretty well
master of five languages, and had not lost them yet, though he wrote no
bill at his door, nor set Latin quotations on the front of the
_Review_." To the end of his days Defoe could not forget this taunt of
want of learning. In one of the papers in _Applebee's Journal_
identified by Mr. Lee (below, Chapter VIII.), he discussed what is to be
understood by "learning," and drew the following sketch of his own