who continued all the while in London. Never made public before." The
story is told with such an air of veracity, the little circumstantial
details are introduced with such apparent artlessness, the grotesque
incidents are described with such animation, (and relish!) the horror
borne in upon the mind of the narrator is so apparently genuine, that we
can easily understand how almost everybody not in the secret of the
authorship believed he had here an authentic "Journal," written by one
who had actually beheld the scenes he describes. Indeed, we know that
twenty-three years after the "Journal" was published, this impression
still prevailed; for Defoe is gravely quoted as an authority in "A
Discourse on the Plague; by Richard Mead, Fellow of the College of
Physicians and of the Royal Society, and Physician to his Majesty. 9th
Edition. London, 1744." Though Defoe, like his admiring critic Mr.
Saintsbury, had but small sense of humor, even he must have felt tickled
in his grave at this ponderous scientific tribute to his skill in the
art of realistic description.

If we inquire further into the secret of Defoe's success in the "History
of the Plague," we shall find that it consists largely in his vision,
or power of seeing clearly and accurately what he describes, before he
attempts to put this description on paper. As Defoe was but four years
old at the time of the Great Plague, his personal recollection of its
effects must have been of the dimmest; but during the years of childhood
(the most imaginative of life) he must often have conversed with persons
who had been through the plague, possibly with those who had recovered
from it themselves. He must often have visited localities ravaged by the
plague, and spared by the Great Fire of 1666; he must often have gazed
in childish horror at those awful mounds beneath which hundreds of human
bodies lay huddled together,--rich and poor, high and low, scoundrel and
saint,--sharing one common bed at last. His retentive memory must have