by party slang writers, or unprincipled religious persecutors; so both these writers found themselves neglected by the minister. In 1704, also, De Foe published the Dissenters Misrepresented and Represented; in which he says that the church party are so hot and bitter, that they cannot hold their persecuting spirit in check till the Occasional Bill is passed, but they want to deprive dissenters from voting for parliament-men as freeholders; and he even recommends the taking the freeholds themselves away, as being equally just with taking away the rights and privileges which the freeholds give; and that another late author had found out the way to crush the dissenters, by having all their children educated in the principles of the Church of England—a policy copied from the court of Louis XIV. of France, who tried every method to extirpate dissenters in France, and this method the last, when all other plans appeared to fail. I wish we could say that this policy of Louis XIV. had never been imported into this country since that period; but, alas! the Privy-Council system of education is only a revival of the same principle, for the attaining the same end, the crushing the dissenters; and this, too, one hundred and thirty years after the death of Daniel De Foe. Dissenters there were, and dissenters there are, and will be, so long as there remain injustice in religious matters; dishonest legislation on church matters; pluralities legalized by my Lord John Russell, on the principle that a man, an Englishman, may be robbed, provided you can prove by legal evidence that he is only a poor man. Dissenter-extirpating plots have been common. It is not for me to go into all these several schemes for deluding and debasing the people, or conspiracies, if you will pardon the term, under the pretence of guiding or educating the people; for such they are; but merely to make a remark or two on them in passing, when reviewing the chequered life of Daniel De Foe, and occasionally comparing his times with our own. In July of this year, 1704, De Foe published A New Test of the Church of England's Honesty. In this pamphlet he regrets that he did not on his trial take a decisive stand, and, by way of defence, show to the jury that the shortest way with the dissenters was the sedition preached constantly from the pulpits of the Church of England, printed, too, in a Church-of-England University; and officially licensed and owned by the Church-of-England authority. He only printed what Sacheverell preached and wrote in his Political Union, licensed by the vice-chancellor of Oxford. De Foe affirms that whatever others might do, he was sure no English jury would have brought him in guilty; he felt sure of an acquittal if he had appealed to a British jury. If he had so appealed, he might have been acquitted; but the times were so corrupt, and the tide of popular opinion running so quickly and counter to common sense, justice, or honesty, that the result of an appeal to a jury could not have been predicted with any certainty. People at this time (1704) were mad for the Church of England, Toryism, and Stuart or Pretender ascendency; with as deadly a hatred of all Presbyterians, Whigs, or Dutchmen. Such is the power of preaching, church-endowed preaching, backed by a knowledge that the sovereign at the time filling the throne has views on all matters descanted on, in hearty union with the text. "Great is Diana of the Ephesians" was a hearty, a loyal shout, backed as it was by the high-priests and master shrine-makers, the whole wealth and respectability of Ephesus, lay and clerical; while Paul, a stranger, a poor low fellow, who had not five shillings in his pocket, and knew nobody-who was he? Leslie, the High-Church champion, complains of De Foe's two pamphlets, the New Test of the Church of England's Loyalty, and the New Test of the Church of England's Honesty, "as full of scurrility, and calculated for mob understandings; and that for peace' sake no answer has hitherto been given by any of the church to either of these invidious pamphlets, though they have been trumpeted up and down both town and country more than any other since the Revolution, and are boasted of as unanswerable by all the dissenters, who triumph in them." Leslie blustered and complained, and threatened to answer; since every Whig, Dissenter, or LowChurchman was asking the question, why the Highflyers did not answer De Foe? Leslie complained and threatened, but answered nothing by pamphlet; but in his paper, started at this time, and named the Rehearsal, published in opposition to De Foe's Review, and Tutchin's Observator, made, from time to time, occasional reflections on De Foe, and these his "pernicious" writings. De Foe's writings had such an extensive sale, that all sorts of mean devices were resorted to, to cheat the author. Mean, low printers, who wanted bread, hawked in the streets any trash of composition, in prose and verse; and in order to excite attention, and force a sale for such trash, they attached the signature of "Daniel De Foe, author of the True-Born Englishman." This dishonourable and injurious practice was carried to so great an extent, that he had to apply to the magistrate occasionally for protection. His own "Scandal Club," forming one division of his Review, was employed as an advertisement of such abuse, as follows: "July 25. The author of the True-Born Englishman was summoned before the club, upon the complaint of a poor hawker, who was sent to Bridewell lately. The poor woman had cried abundance of scoundrel papers-Trip to the Devil's Summer-house; High Flyer; Low Flyer, and the like; all as written by the author of the TrueBorn Englishman; for which he made complaint to the magistrate, and had laid hold of this one by way of example. The woman insisted that he was the author of it, and summoned in a crowd of printers to justify it, they having ordered her to cry it so, and told her it was true; but when the poor woman wanted her vouchers, none of them would appear. The author, to prove the negative in the particular paper which the woman was taken with, viz., the Picture of a High Flyer, produced the very paper, varied only in a few proper names, printed above twenty years ago; being written by Henry Care, and called the Character of a Tory. The society pitied the poor woman, and let her go; but resolved that the printers should stand convicted of petty forgery, and be bound once a weck to repeat the following lines à la penitent, as a further satisfaction to the author : : "The mob of wretched writers stand, With storms of wit in every hand; They bait my mem'ry in the street, And charge me with the credit of their wit. I bear the scandal of their crimes; My name's the hackney title of the times. Hymn, song, lampoon, ballad, and pasquinade, My muse must be the whore of poetry, And all Apollo's bastards laid to me." Besides the common street hawkers of penny trash using his name to sell their worthless broad-sheets and penny ballads, authors of more apparent respectability either stole his name to set off their trash, or attacked him by name, in what were termed the Hudibrastic verse. This poetry was written by Ned Ward, the great alehouse poet and wit of the time, who worked in the ranks of the strongest side, as all such characters always do; and at this time Church and King would be the grand sheet-anchor of this fellow's existence; for his slanderous attacks were generally levelled at De Foe and Tutchin, the representatives of the dissenting or liberal party; poor De Foe having stood three times in the pillory; and Tutchin having been flogged once at least, tied to a cart-tail, down Dorchester streets. The Comical History of the Life and Death of Mumper, Generalissimo of King Charles II.'s Dogs, by Heliostropolis, secretary to the Emperor of the Moon, was written by De Foe about this time; and also a Dictionary of Religions, Ancient and Modern, whether Jewish, Pagan, Christian, or Mahometan. This was the first general Dictionary of Religions published in the English language. On Aug. 29, 1704, De Foe published his Hymn to Victory, in compliment to the Duke of Marlborough, with five pages of poetic preface to the Queen, and thirty pages of poetic congratulation to the Duke; the preface commencing thus: Madam, the glories of your happy reign Are sealed from heaven, and hell resists in vain; If this is but the earnest of your fame, To what strange height will Heaven exalt your name; you reflect on glories still behind. CHAPTER IV. AFTER his release from Newgate, De Foe took up his residence at Bury St. Edmund's, in Suffolk, as we have seen, where he resided in quietness, writing his books; but remained so long, that the Tory scamps of the day (for such were the paid scribes of that party for the most part) had to invent the slander, that he had run away from justice; in short, that he had not been seen since the £100 reward had been offered in the London Gazette for the apprehension of the writer of the Memorial to the Lords; and also that a government warrant was out against him as the author of this Memorial. This slander having so constantly appeared in the Tory Rehearsals, Observators, Craftsmen, True Britons, Examiners, Corn-cutters' Journal, and other newspapers or pamphlets, from Leslie down to Browne and Ward, that poor De Foe's credit was completely impaired; at least he intimates as much in his Review at the time; so that he had to advertise himself in his own Review as living at large at Bury St. Edmund's, where he could be found at any time; and, as government had been mixed up with his retirement, and the slander of his having absconded, he wrote to the secretary of state to inform him that, if a government warrant was really out against him, he might be found living at Bury St. Edmund's; to which notification he received a friendly reply, that the government were not in search of him. On Nov. 4 he thus writes in his Review, page 291: "Whereas, in several written news-letters dispersed about the country, and supposed to be written by one Dyer, a news-writer, and by Mr. Fox, bookseller in Westminster Hall, it has falsely, and of mere malice, been scandalously asserted that Daniel De Foe was absconded and fled from justice; that he had been searched for by |