devil's-bit.

(P. 82.)
That hardened villain was so far from denying it, that he said it was
true, and ---- him they would do it still before they had done with
them.

Observe when a man has once abandoned himself to wickedness, he cannot
stop, and does not join the devils till he has become a devil himself.
Rebelling against his conscience he becomes the slave of his own furious
will.

One excellence of De Foe, amongst many, is his sacrifice of lesser
interest to the greater because more universal. Had he (as without any
improbability he might have done) given his Robinson Crusoe any of the
turn for natural history, which forms so striking and delightful a
feature in the equally uneducated Dampier;--had he made him find out
qualities and uses in the before (to him) unknown plants of the island,
discover, for instance, a substitute for hops, or describe birds,
&c.--many delightful pages and incidents might have enriched the
book;--but then Crusoe would have ceased to be the universal
representative, the person, for whom every reader could substitute
himself. But now nothing is done, thought, suffered, or desired, but
what every man can imagine himself doing, thinking, feeling, or wishing
for. Even so very easy a problem as that of finding a substitute for
ink, is with exquisite judgment made to baffle Crusoe's inventive
faculties. And in what he does, he arrives at no excellence; he does not
make basket work like Will Atkins; the carpentering, tailoring, pottery,
&c. are all just what will answer his purposes, and those are confined
to needs that all men have, and comforts that all men desire. Crusoe