"Defoe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... above-mentioned fantastic stories are too apt to forget. It is in this natural romantic gift that Borrow's greatest charm lies. But it is accompanied and nearly equalled, both in quality and in degree, by a faculty for dialogue. Except Defoe and Dumas, I cannot think of any novelists who contrive to tell a story in dialogue and to keep up the ball of conversation so well as Borrow; while he is considerably the superior of both in pure style and in the literary ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... English features that are always conspicuous in Mr. Fenn's stories—a humour racy of the British soil, the manly vigour of his sentiment, and wholesome moral lessons. For anything to match his realistic touch we must go to Daniel Defoe."—Christian Leader. ...
— Tales of Daring and Danger • George Alfred Henty
... their entire library for week-day reading. "Successive numbers hung from a string by the chimney or ranked by years and generations on cupboard shelves."[26-A] But when Franklin made "Poor Richard" an international success, he, by giving short extracts from Swift, Steele, Defoe, and Bacon, accustomed the provincial population, old and young, to something better than the meagre religious fare provided ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... was the publisher of the "Weekly Journal," for which Defoe wrote many important papers. The greater part of his career as a printer was spent in trials and imprisonments for the "libels" which appeared in his journal. This was largely due to the fact that his weekly newspaper became ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... daughters and wives, in a series of exquisite illustrations. Every body has La Fontaine by heart, thanks to the pencil of Granville, which requires neither grammar nor dictionary to aid its interpretations; and even Defoe—even the unparalleled Robinson Crusoe—is devoured by our ingenuous youth in cuts ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... located in the grand new building at the foot of Government Street. If it would not be considered far-fetched I would like to send you a word or two on the origin of savings banks. The first ideas of thrift were promulgated by Daniel Defoe in 1697; it was a happy Socialistic discovery. In 1797 Jeremy Bentham taught the principles of thrift. In 1799 the first savings bank was started at Windover in Buckinghamshire, by the Rev. Joseph ...
— Some Reminiscences of old Victoria • Edgar Fawcett
... her down a hill; they cut off some noses, others' hands, and several barbarous tricks, without any provocation. They are said to be young gentlemen; they never take any money from any." See also the Spectator, Nos. 324, 332, and 347 (where Budgell alludes to "the late panic fear"), and Defoe's Review for March 15, 1712. Swift was in considerable alarm about the Mohocks throughout March, and said that they were all Whigs. The reports that numbers of persons, including men of figure, had ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... them between long periods of abstinence, during which he would scout the expenditure of an unnecessary dollar, coming home with a parcel under his arm for which he vouchsafed no explanation, and which would disclose itself to be Lockhart, or Sterne, or Borrow, or Defoe. Mrs Murchison kept a discouraging eye upon such purchases; and when her husband brought home Chambers's Dictionary of English Literature, after shortly and definitely repulsing her demand that he should get himself a new winter overcoat, she declared that it ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... edited and republished by Dr. Arcadius Avellanus, Philadelphia, 1900 (173 pages). An abridgement of the original edition was edited by P. A. Barnett, under the title The Story of Robinson Crusoe in Latin, adapted from Defoe by Goffeaux, Longmans, Green and Co., 1907. Among original compositions in ancient Latin for students may be mentioned (1) Ritchie's Fabulae Faciles, A First Latin Reader, edited by John Copeland Kirtland, Jr., of Phillips Exeter Academy, Longmans, Green & Co., 1903 ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... for bread to maintain the vital strength they labour with: so living in a daily circulation of sorrow, living but to work, and working but to live, as if daily bread were the only end of a wearisome life, and a wearisome life the only occasion of daily bread.'—DANIEL DEFOE. ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... classes, had grown up unable either to read or write. But after the Treaty of Westphalia matters began to improve, and a desire to cultivate the native language awoke. In 1688 German superseded Latin in the universities. Novels were published; and about this time appeared a German translation of Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" that became very popular. Poets wrote plays in the style of Terence, or copied English models; and even in the present day the Germans recall with pride the fact that the Shakespearean plays were appreciated by ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... eighteenth century beer and wine were commonly sold at the coffee houses in addition to tea and chocolate. Daniel Defoe, writing of his visit to Shrewsbury in 1724, says, "I found there the most coffee houses around the Town Hall that ever I saw in any town, but when you come into them they are but ale houses, only they think that the name coffee ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... Universities, which ought to be the centres of light diffusing itself throughout the whole nation, the training-grounds of those who are to be the trainers of their fellow men, we have the evidence of such different kinds of men as Swift, Defoe, Gray, Gibbon, Johnson, John Wesley, Lord Eldon, and Lord Chesterfield all agreeing on this point, that both the great Universities were neglectful and inefficient in the performance of their proper work. If we ask what was the state of the highest classes, we ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... explanation did not lie upon the surface. Indeed the following note regarding the tract called A New Test of the Church of England's Loyalty shows that he sometimes neglected very obvious sources of information, for the piece is given in one of Defoe's own collections of his works: "This defence of whiggish loyalty," says Scott, "seems to have been written by the celebrated Daniel De Foe, a conjecture which is strengthened by the frequent reference to his poem of the True-born ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... revelling in the minuteness of the descriptions, one follows happily or sadly the fortunes of Ruppenthal and Kopp and Morgenstern. Everything is true, for the compilers of the book have felt, like Defoe, that "this supplying a story by invention is certainly a most scandalous crime." We are given all the names of those who at the beginning occupied the ninety-nine houses—the hundredth being used as an inn—with their ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... such actions which he might have performed," the author himself says, [Footnote: Introduction to Miscellanies, 1st ed., p. xvii.] "or would, or should have performed, than what he really did. ... The Life and Actions of the Late Jonathan Wild, got out with characteristic commercial energy by Defoe, soon after the criminal's execution, is very different from Fielding's satirical narrative, and probably a good deal ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... born in London on the 8th of May 1698. After serving an apprenticeship with a bookseller, he devised a system of instructing the deaf and dumb, by the practice of which he made a considerable fortune. It brought him to the notice of Daniel Defoe, whose youngest daughter Sophia he married in 1729. A year before, under the name of Henry Stonecastle, he was associated with Defoe in starting the Universal Spectator and Weekly Journal. In 1740 he was elected fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and of the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... side street, it being of "no use to me" St. George had said—"and the rent will come in handy." Tales of the sea especially delighted the young fellow—the old admiral's blood being again in evidence—and so might have been the mother's fine imagination. It was Defoe and Mungo Park and Cooke who enchained the boy's attention, as well as many of the chronicles of the later navigators. But of the current literature of the day—Longfellow, Margaret Fuller, Hawthorne, and Emerson—no one appealed to him as did the man Poe. He and St. George had passed ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... her, has been made a prisoner under the false charge of lunacy. Jemima's friendship is so completely won that she allows these two companions in misery to see much of each other. She even tells them her story, which, as a picture of degradation, equals that of some of Defoe's heroines. Darnford then tells his, and the reader at once recognizes in him another Imlay. Finally, by a lucky accident the two prisoners make their escape, and Jemima accompanies them. The latter part of the story ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... that one. I went to it again to see if there were any more, and to observe if it might not be my fancy; but there was no room for that, for there was exactly the very print of a foot, toes, heel, and every part of a foot. How it came thither I knew not, nor could in the least imagine.—DEFOE. ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... By DANIEL DEFOE. An edition de luxe, printed on exquisite paper, with 16 illustrations by Thomas Stothard, R.A., with an introduction by Austin Dobson. Fac-simile of the frontispiece and title-page of the original edition, ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... combined to make it a book that appealed strongly to all who read or heard it read, and stimulated among the masses a desire to read comparable to that awakened by the chaining of the English Bible in the churches a century before (R. 170). In 1719 the first great English novel, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, and in 1726 Gulliver's Travels, added new stimulus to the desires awakened by Bunyan's book. All three were books of the common people, whereas the dramas, plays, essays, and scholarly works previously produced had appealed only to a small educated class. ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... brother Ricardo imparted his enthusiasm for two stories to me. These were Robinson Crusoe and Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island, or rather, I should say they were The Mysterious Island and Robinson Crusoe, because we preferred Jules Verne's tale greatly to Defoe's. ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... never even known them. The eidolon of James Haddock appeared to a man named Taverner, that he might interest himself in recovering a piece of land unjustly kept from the dead man's infant son. If we may trust Defoe, Bishop Jeremy Taylor twice examined Taverner, and was convinced of the truth of his story. In this case, Taverner had formerly known Haddock. But the apparition of an old gentleman which entered the learned Dr. ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... was hugely diverted. The real greatness of "Gulliver" lies in its teeming imagination and implacable logic. Swift succeeded in endowing the wildest improbabilities with an air of veracity rivalling Defoe himself. (See also Vol. X, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... dollars) did not even spare his dogs; but that his pet spaniel and greyhound were cruelly killed by a table-fork thrust into their entrails. Nay, their game-keeper even buried two dogs alive, which belonged to his neighbor, Mr. Wade, a substantial grazier. His story of it is very Defoe-like and pitiful:—"I myself heard them," he says, "ten days after they had been buried, and, seeing some people at a distance, inquired what dogs they were. 'They are some dogs that are lost, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... mouth-to-mouth traditions, and it can be traced surely to the fabliaux of the thirteenth century. Later writers aided in its development: Mallory's "Morte D'Arthur" and Caxton's popularization of old romances marked a further progress; and some of the work of Defoe and Addison would almost stand the modern tests. But the short story as we know it to-day is a product of the nineteenth century; and it owes its position in literature, if not its very existence, to the work of Irving, Hawthorne, ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... of the dimness, and she got a needle and thread and tried to darn the holes in the curtains and cushions, but the rotten stuff crumbled under her fingers, and would not hold the stitches. At last she found in a dusty corner a boardless book with neither beginning nor end, being Defoe's Plague of London. She read and read with a horrid fascination, believing every word of it, wondering whether this house could have been infected, and at length ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... however, to have ceased before the days of Sewall's Diary: for, though he often mentions the crime, he makes no mention of such a punishment. The custom of execution for far less heinous offences was prevalent in the seventeenth century, as any reader of Defoe and other writers of his day is well aware, and certainly the American colonists cannot be blamed for exercising the severest laws against offenders of so serious a nature against society. The execution of a woman ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... unseemly plays, she astonished the town, and achieved real fame by relating the story of Oroonoko's life. There are few plots of either plays or novels so striking as that of "Oroonoko." It is the first of those romances of the outlands, which, from the days of Defoe to the days of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, have been one of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... not always determine the desired quality which makes it literature. A biography may contain all the facts in regard to a man and his character, arranged in an orderly and comprehensible manner, and yet not be literature; but it may be so written, like Plutarch's Lives or Defoe's account of Robinson Crusoe, that it is literature, and of imperishable value as a picture of human life, as a satisfaction to the want of the human mind which is higher than the want of knowledge. And this contribution, which I desire to be understood to mean when I speak ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... further Adventures, with Life of Defoe, &c. Upwards of 60 fine Woodcuts, from designs by ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... school days another book besides those prescribed in the curriculum came into his hands. He read Robinson Crusoe. It was to Defoe's undying tale of the stranded mariner that he attributed the awaking in his own mind of a passionate desire to sail in uncharted seas. This anecdote happens to be better authenticated than are many of those quoted to illustrate the youth ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... thing, the latest book of actual travel. But to be the favourite author of those who sit in arm-chairs is no small thing, and, as I have said already, Borrow stands with Carlyle and Dickens in our century, by which I mean the nineteenth century; with Defoe and Goldsmith in the eighteenth century, as one of the really great and imperishable masters ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... and fancy will have to be picked out of a mass of rubbish; and they will be enjoyed for their vivacious originality and Voltairean pungency, not as masterpieces or complete creations. That Disraeli wrote much stuff is true enough. But so did Fielding, so did Swift, and Defoe, and Goldsmith. Writers are to be judged by their best; and it does not matter so very much if that best is little in bulk. Disraeli's social and political satires have a peculiar and rare flavour of their own, charged with an insight and a vein of wit such as no other ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... mentioned in the second letter as having once had a great oak in it which was blown down in the great storm of 1703—a storm of which Defoe collected the chief records into a book—bears witness also to the cheerful village life of old. The name is a corruption of Play- stow; it was the playground for the village children. That oak blown down in 1703, which the vicar of the time vainly endeavoured to root again, was said to have lived ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 2 • Gilbert White
... to be in favour of the establishment of a censorship. (And by a censorship I mean such a censorship as would judge books by a code which, if it was applied to them, would excommunicate the Bible, Shakespeare, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Swift, Shelley, Rossetti, Meredith, Hardy, and George Moore. "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel" would never, as a new work, pass a library censorship. Nor would "Jude the Obscure," nor half a dozen of Hardy's other books; nor would ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... in conjunction with the right politics, might recommend them to such men as Halifax or Somers. The political power of the press was meanwhile rapidly developing. Harley, Lord Oxford, was one of the first to appreciate its importance. He employed Defoe and other humble writers who belonged to Grub Street—that is, to professional journalism in its infancy—as well as Swift, whose pamphlets struck the heaviest blow at the Whigs in the last years of that period. Swift's ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... there remained only the initial A. His word was taken, and this use of the charm was popular even in the Spectators time. It is described by Defoe in his History ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... a most interesting account of all his travels in different parts of the world, and his book was for a long time the standard book of travels. Defoe used the materials it contained for his celebrated novel, Robinson Crusoe. But it turned away the tide of discovery from Australia; for those who read of the beautiful islands and rich countries Dampier had elsewhere visited would never dream ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland
... these; we refer to the treasures of our elder and better authors. If our young medical student would take our advice, and for an hour or two twice a week take up a volume of Shakspeare, Cervantes, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Cowper, Montaigne, Addison, Defoe, Goldsmith, Fielding, Scott, Charles Lamb, Macaulay, Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, Helps, Thackeray, &c., not to mention authors on deeper and more sacred subjects—they would have happier and healthier minds, and make none the worse doctors. If they, by ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... inns were generally under the shadow of the church steeple, and, like the churches, were well attended, reminding one of Daniel Defoe, the clever author of that wonderful book Robinson Crusoe, for ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... Borrow recalls childish memories of Canterbury and of Hythe, at which latter place he saw the church vault filled with ancient skulls as we may see it there to-day. And after that the book which impressed itself most vividly upon his memory was Robinson Crusoe. How much he came to revere Defoe the pages of Lavengro most eloquently reveal to us. 'Hail to thee, spirit of Defoe! What does not my own poor self owe to thee?' In 1810-11 his father was in the barracks at Norman Cross in Huntingdonshire. Here the Government had bought a large tract of land, and built upon it a huge ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... home of various celebrated men: John Howard, the philanthropist, who did so much to alleviate the horrors of prison-life; Defoe, whom we all love for the sake of Robinson Crusoe; Dr. Watts, author of many of our best-known hymns, ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... had repeated this I know not; the sound falls on my ear like the lapping of a hundred waves, or as the "Robin Crusoe, Robin Crusoe," of the parrot smote upon the ear of the terrified islander of Defoe; but at last I wake, to view, by the dim firelight, this vision: Mrs. B. is sitting up beside me, in a listening attitude of the very intensest kind; her nightcap (one with cherry-coloured ribbons, such as it can be no harm to speak about) is ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... wife and children for more than a few minutes; if he remained in the house, he kept apart in a room of his own, musing over, rather than reading, a little collection of books—one of his favourites being Defoe's "History of the Devil." He often made ironical remarks, and seemed to have a grim satisfaction when his hearers missed the point. Then he would chuckle, and shake his head, and ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... naturally became a pamphleteer. Outside of Parliament there was no other mode of discussing public affairs. The periodical press for purposes of discussion did not exist. During and after the Great Rebellion, the pamphlet had made its appearance as the chief instrument of controversy. Defoe used it freely after the Restoration. Swift made a great hit with it, and probably achieved the first sensational sale with his pamphlet on 'The Conduct of the Allies.' Bolingbroke's 'Patriot King' was a work of the same class. As a rule ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... this state of juvenile acquiescence, had begun to make inquiry of himself, and, as a result, had familiarised himself with many mental pictures in which he figured as an adventurer rich in adventures. In his day the youth of England were less instructed than they are now, but the immortal Defoe existed, and Lemuel Gulliver was as real as he is to-day. Perhaps the Board schools may have made that great mariner a little less real than he used to be. Joe believed in him with all his heart, had never had the shadow of a doubt about him, and meant to ...
— Julia And Her Romeo: A Chronicle Of Castle Barfield - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... the great plague of London, in 1665, the people listened with similar avidity to the predictions of quacks and fanatics. Defoe says, that at that time the people were more addicted to prophecies and astronomical conjurations, dreams, and old wives' tales than ever they were before or since. Almanacs, and their predictions, frightened them terribly. Even the year before the plague broke out, they ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... honourably established. It is not that his parentage has been lost to history in a discreet and charitable silence; on the contrary, it is rather that that honour has been claimed by over-many, covetous of the distinction. He seems to come within the category of Defoe's true-born Englishman, "whose parents were the Lord knows who," not because there should be any doubt upon the subject, but because none suspected at the time the latent importance of the bantling and the circumstances ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... have come down to us respecting the trade of past times, confirm this view. In his "Complete English Tradesman," Defoe mentions, among other manoeuvres of retailers, the false lights which they introduced into their shops, for the purpose of giving delusive appearances to their goods. He comments on the "shop rhetorick," the "flux of falsehoods," which tradesmen ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... presentation of the thief's personal point of view, a vivid picture of the society in which he lived and robbed and of the influences, moral and political, by which he was surrounded. The story indeed has something of the quality of Defoe's 'Colonel Jacque'; it is filled with convincing details."—New ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... the exception of "Robinson Crusoe," should have been covered with the dust of neglect for many generations, is a plain proof of how much fashions in taste affect the popularity of the British classics. It is true that three generations or so ago, Defoe's works were edited by both Sir Walter Scott and Hazlitt, and that this masterly piece of realism, "Captain Singleton," was reprinted a few years back in "The Camelot Classics," but it is safe to say that out of every thousand readers of "Robinson Crusoe" ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... feature in English literature. Then, in the City, one Garraway, of Exchange Alley, first sold 'tea in leaf and drink, made according to the directions of the most knowing, and travellers into those eastern countries;' and thus established the well-known 'Garraway's,' whither, in Defoe's day, 'foreign banquiers' and even ministers resorted, to drink the said beverage. 'Robin's,' 'Jonathan's,' and many another, were all opened about this time, and the rage for coffee-house life ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... forging by Newton of the final link of the chain of reasoning on which modern astronomy is based; but in those times the minds of men moved more slowly than in ours. The masses still held to the old beliefs about the heavenly bodies. Defoe, indeed, speaking of the terror of men at the time of the Great Plague, says that they 'were more addicted to prophecies and astrological conjurations, dreams, and old wives' tales, than ever they were before or since.' But in reality, it was only because of the great misery then prevailing ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... poems and other miscellaneous matter, was succeeded, in 1707, by Oldmixon's Muses' Mercury; or, The Monthly Miscellany, a periodical which contained also notices of new plays and books, and numbered Steele among its contributors. Defoe's Review, begun in 1704, aimed at setting the affairs of Europe in a clearer light, regardless of party; but, added Defoe, "After our serious matters are over, we shall at the end of every paper present you with a little diversion, as anything occurs to make the world merry; and ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... only in the early eighteenth century, in the age of Queen Anne. But Cotton Mather's Magnalia, a vast book dealing with the past history of New England, was printed in 1702, only a year later than Defoe's True-Born Englishman. For more than two centuries the development of English speech and English writing on this side of the Atlantic has kept measurable pace—now slower, now swifter—with the speech of the mother country. ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... doors, he felt so ill at ease that he was obliged to buy some roll tobacco to smell and chew. There is nothing to show that Pepys even smoked, which considering his proficiency in the arts of good-fellowship, is perhaps a little surprising. Defoe, in his fictitious but graphic "Journal of the Plague Year in London," says that the sexton of one of the London parishes, who personally handled a large number of the victims, never had the distemper at all, but lived about twenty years after it, ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... was the most of the plot. I might almost say it was the whole. A few reminiscences of Poe, Defoe, and Washington Irving, a copy of Johnson's "Buccaneers," the name of the Dead Man's Chest from Kingsley's "At Last," some recollections of canoeing on the high seas, and the map itself, with its infinite, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... visions of a State superior to that in which they lived; Burton foresaw improvements in the administration of justice, and the condition of the poorer classes, which waited for two centuries for some measure of realization; even Defoe had his list of "projects," some of which, laughed at in their day, are the realities of our time. No great reform in any direction was ever effected which had not been the ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... space nor inclination to follow their adventures, and must refer to Mr. Southey's elaborate and excellent account of them. Daniel Defoe alone could have so handled the subject as to make delightful so dull and so sad a tale. I am but a looker on to whom the actions of the present are more interesting than the past, but yet am not insensible to the influence that the elder days have ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... would have resulted—if the record had been kept faithfully and without any self-conscious sense of audience—between 1914 and 1918 in the gradual compiling of a human document of immense historical value. Compared with it, the diaries of Defoe and Pepys would pale and be flavourless. But it must have been begun in June, 1914, and have been written with the casualness of that commonplace realism which is the most convincing realism of all. It is true that the expression of the uncomplex mind is infrequently articulate, but the ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Bouilly, in 1802, in which the founder of the first school for the deaf and his pupils are touchingly portrayed. Feigned characters are also found, as Scott's mute in "The Talisman"; in Moliere's "Le Medecin malgre Lui"; Jonson's "Epicoene"; and John Poole's "Deaf as a Post". Defoe has a character, Duncan Campbell, which is possibly based on one from real life, being referred to by Addison in the Spectator and the Tatler. On the subject of the deaf in fiction, see Silent Worker, Dec., 1893; Annals, xxxix., 1894, p. 79; Indiana Bulletin ...
— The Deaf - Their Position in Society and the Provision for Their - Education in the United States • Harry Best
... fasting, the evil possessor had been driven forth with howling and many cries from the body which it had come to inhabit; he spoke of those strange New England cases which had happened not so long before; of Mr. Defoe, who had written a book, wherein he had named many modes of subduing apparitions, and sending them back whence they came; and, lastly, he spoke low of dreadful ways of compelling witches to undo their witchcraft. But I ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... it's the court, or the honours and the orders and all the social and imperial spoils, that keep the illusion up, or whether it is the Old World inability to change anything, you can't ever quite decide. In Defoe's time they put pots of herbs on the desks of every court in London to keep the plague off. The pots of herbs are yet put on every desk in every court room in London. Several centuries ago somebody tried to break into the ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... fought for noble principles, in the lives and deaths of Falkland and Hampden, of Blake, Montrose, and Cromwell. If its nobility is dimmed as we pass from the world of Shakespeare and Milton to that of Dryden and Defoe, yet there is sufficient unity in its central theme to justify the enthusiasm of those who praise it as the ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... literature with old wives' tales of the worthies of England, in which the clothiers Thomas of Reading and Jack of Newbury rub elbows with Friar Bacon and Robin Hood. It has filled our shires with gentlemen; for, as Defoe observed, in the early eighteenth century 'many of the great families who now pass for gentry in the western counties have been originally raised from and built up by this truly noble manufacture'. It has filled our census lists with surnames—Weaver, Webber, Webb, Sherman, Fuller, Walker, Dyer—and ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... there were such splendid victories abroad. It was a time, too, when there were almost as many able writers as in Queen Elizabeth's time. The two books written at that day, which you are most likely to have heard of, are Robinson Crusoe, written by Daniel Defoe, and Alexander ...
— Young Folks' History of England • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Inn in London with trowel in hand and a book in his pocket. Joseph Hunter was a carpenter in youth, Robert Burns a plowman, Keats a druggist, Thomas Carlyle and Hugh Miller masons. Dante and Descartes were soldiers. Andrew Johnson was a tailor. Cardinal Wolsey, Defoe, and Kirke White were butchers' sons. Faraday was the son of a blacksmith, and his teacher, Humphry Davy, was an apprentice to an apothecary. Kepler was a waiter boy in a German hotel, Bunyan a tinker, Copernicus the son of a Polish baker. The boy Herschel ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... magnitude as the black death, which destroyed millions of the human race in the fourteenth century and was particularly dreadful in England. Hume has given but a single paragraph to it and others have been equally brief. Defoe has given us a journal of the plague, but it is not written in a true scientific spirit; and Caius, in 1562, gave us a primitive treatise on the sweating sickness. It is due to the translation of Hecker's "Epidemics ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... of someone who was startled to find footprints. Who was it? The child had never heard of Defoe's hermit. He asked Stoffel. ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... English Novel. The Old Romance and the New Novel. Defoe. Richardson. Fielding. Influence of the Early Novelists. Summary of the Period. ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... administrators of the nation. Probably, however, by far the majority of those who were of average capacity found compensation for the confiscated commons in domestic industry, owning their houses with lots of land and the tools of their trade. Defoe has left a charming description of the region about Halifax in Yorkshire, toward the year 1730, where he found the whole population busy, prosperous, healthy, and, in the main, self-sufficing. He did not see a beggar or an idle person in the whole ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... writer does not pretend to possess what is termed literary style, he would ask the indulgence of the reader in any little slip of the pen which may occur in these pages, as it is not every Crusoe who can command the facile quill, the pure style, or the lively imagination of a Daniel Defoe, to narrate his adventures. ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... because of its use in teaching, is J. R. Green's Short History of the English People, with its grotesque insistence upon Anglo-Saxonism. And just now, the world is in a sort of delirium about race and the racial struggle. The Briton forgetting his Defoe, [Footnote: The True-born Englishman.] the Jew forgetting the very word proselyte, the German forgetting his anthropometric variations, and the Italian forgetting everything, are obsessed by the singular purity of their blood, and the danger ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... revelation to transfigure the lives of his characters, he does so because, in actual experience, he finds those selfsame words indelibly engraven upon the souls of men. And, after all, Sydney Carton's Text is really Charles Dickens' Text; Robinson Crusoe's Text is Daniel Defoe's Text; the text that stands embedded in the pathos of Uncle Tom's Cabin is the text that Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe had enthroned within her heart. Moreover, to whatever group these splendid orbs belong, their deathless radiance ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... trowel in hand and a book in his pocket. Joseph Hunter was a carpenter in youth, Robert Burns a plowman, Keats a druggist, Thomas Carlyle and Hugh Miller masons. Dante and Descartes were soldiers. Cardinal Wolsey, Defoe, and Kirke White were butchers' sons. Faraday was the son of a hostler, and his teacher, Humphry Davy, was an apprentice to an apothecary. Kepler was a waiter boy in a German hotel, Bunyan a tinker, Copernicus the son of a Polish baker. ...
— An Iron Will • Orison Swett Marden
... (who must have given Folio that copy of the "Arcadia"), the Viscount St. Albans, and even two or three others before whom either of these might have doffed his bonnet, did not disdain to gather round that hearthstone. Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Defoe, Dick Steele, Dean Swift—there was no end to them! On certain nights, when all the stolid neighborhood was lapped in slumber, the narrow street stretching beneath Tom Folio's windows must have been blocked with invisible coaches and sedan-chairs, and illuminated ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... position was expressed in that phrase of one of his letters "our civilisation is a dingy ungentlemanly business: it drops so much out of a man." On the whole he concluded that what had been dropped out of the man was the boy. He pursued pirates as Defoe would have fled from them; and summed up his simplest emotions in that touching cri de coeur "shall we never shed blood?" He did for the penny dreadful what Coleridge had done for the penny ballad. He proved that, because it was really human, it could really rise as near to heaven as ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... of which for them he is really the creator—this is the way of his criticism; cast off in a stray letter often, or passing note, or lightest essay or conversation. It is in such a letter, for instance, that we come upon a singularly penetrative estimate of the genius and writings of Defoe. ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... character. The stately and classic form being set aside for a style more familiar, and which concerned itself with the affairs of everyday life. Letters showed with a mild splendor, while Steele, Sterne, Swift, Defoe and Fielding were writing, and Addison's "Spectator" was ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... published in the earlier part of last century, and attributed to Daniel Defoe, we read; "To see a new moon the first time after her change, on the right hand, or directly before you, betokens the utmost good fortune that month; as to have her on your left, or behind you, so that in turning your head back you happen to see her, ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... except, perhaps, the Bible. Honest John was the first that I know of who mixed narration and dialogue; a method of writing very engaging to the reader, who in the most interesting parts finds himself, as it were, brought into the company and present at the discourse. Defoe in his Crusoe, his Moll Flanders, Religious Courtship, Family Instructor, and other pieces, has imitated it with success, and Richardson has done the ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... Defoe's but two or three Novels, and the Plague History. I can give you no information about him. As a slight general character of what I remember of them (for I have not look'd into them latterly) I would say that "in the appearance of truth in all the incidents and conversations that occur in ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... fiction, he produced "Pamela," the first novel of analysis, in contrast with the tale of adventure, of the English tongue. It is worth remarking that Richardson wrote this story at an age when many novelists have well-nigh completed their work; even as Defoe published his masterpiece, "Robinson Crusoe," at fifty-eight. But such forms as drama and fiction are the very ones where ripe maturity, a long and varied experience with the world and a trained hand in the technique of the craft, go for their full value. A study of the chronology of novel-making ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... with fresh speculation that seeks everywhere the well-being of society by growth of material and moral power. There is a wonderful fertility of mind, and almost whimsical precision of detail, with good sense and good humour to form the groundwork of a happy English style. Defoe in this book ran again and again into sound suggestions that first came to be realised long after he was dead. Upon one subject, indeed, the education of women, we have only just now caught him up. Defoe wrote the book in 1692 or 1693, when his age ...
— An Essay Upon Projects • Daniel Defoe
... way to get all the truth is to tell your own story, every potential novelist wrote his own story, enriching it, where sensation was thin, from the biographies of his intimates. Rousseau was reborn without his social philosophy. Defoe was reincarnated, but more anxious now to describe precisely what happened to him than ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... very valuable instrument of criticism even in regard to the great writers of the early nineteenth century. Wordsworth, like Defoe, drew straight from the life. Those who will may call him a Romantic. He told of adventures—the adventures of the mind. He did not write of Bacchus, Venus, and Apollo; neither did he concern himself with Merlin, Tristram, and the Lady of the Lake. He shunned what is derived ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... story simply told in outline, but without loss of interest, for children not yet able to read and understand the complete work of Defoe. ...
— Tom and Maggie Tulliver • Anonymous
... has given us no less than two: the purely romantic, in his fascinating portraits of the Fair Imperia; and the romantically realistic, in his Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes. Reade's Peg Woffington may be called the literary parallel of the costume drama; Defoe's Moll Flanders is honestly realistic; Zola's Nana ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... wide Fen Country there also grew up the abbeys of Peterborough, Crowland, Thorney, and Ramsey—all under the Benedictine rules. To the proximity of these great monasteries was due the beginning of the scholastic element in Cambridge, and perhaps the immense popularity of Stourbridge Fair, which Defoe thought the greatest in Europe, may have helped to locate the University there. Exactly when or how the first little centre of learning was established in the town is still a matter of uncertainty, but ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... remarkable narratives of acquaintances she had made with people who lived under the ground close by us, in my father's orchard. Her literal descriptions quite deceived me; I swallowed her stories entire, just as people in the last century did Defoe's account of "The Apparition ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... that before it his faults or failings seem very trifling, is his absolutely vigorous, marvellously varied originality, based on direct familiarity with Nature, but guided and cultured by the study of natural, simple writers, such as Defoe and Smollett. I think that the "interest" in or rather sympathy for gypsies, in his case as in mine, came not from their being curious or dramatic beings, but because they are so much a part of free life, of out-of-doors Nature; so ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... enough to us, and the literature sufficiently familiar to enable us to judge. Whether folk swore by their troth in the days of king Richard I. we do not know, but when we read Swift's letters, and Addison's papers, or Defoe's novels we do catch the veritable sounds of Queen Anne's age, and can say for ourselves whether Thackeray has caught them correctly or not. No reader can doubt that he has done so. Nor is the reader ever struck with the affectation of an assumed dialect. The words come as though ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... twinkling tenderness his little daughter as she ran backwards and forwards busy with the manifold cares of childhood, while all the time, to his Young Men gathered round him, he was thundering against the last book, or the last picture show, or the last new music, in language not unworthy of Defoe or Smollett, for Henley could call a spade not only a spade but a steam shovel when so minded. He could soar to the heights and dive to the ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... again in A Reply to Mr. Palmer's Vindication (1707). It is scarcely to Wesley's credit that in this quarrel he stood shoulder to shoulder with that most hot-headed of all contemporary bigots, Henry Sacheverell. His prominence in the controversy earned him the ironic compliments of Defoe, who recalled that our "Mighty Champion of this very High-Church Cause" had once written a poem to satirize frenzied Tories (Review, II, no. 87, Sept. 22, 1705). About a week later Defoe, having got ...
— Epistle to a Friend Concerning Poetry (1700) and the Essay on Heroic Poetry (second edition, 1697) • Samuel Wesley
... which is still standing in Willow Lane, Norwich. George was at once entered as a pupil at King Edward's Grammar School, then conducted by Dr. Valpy, and remained a scholar there till 1818, when he attained his fifteenth year. As a schoolboy he appears to have been an apter pupil of Defoe than of the reverend headmaster of the Norwich academy. Dr. James Martineau, who was one of his schoolfellows, has related how Borrow once persuaded several of his companions to rob their father's tills, and run away to join the ...
— George Borrow in East Anglia • William A. Dutt
... liberty involves nothing more spiritual than the security of property, and is consistent with slavery and persecution; or even to Addison, who conceived that the right of voting taxes belonged to no country but his own. Defoe affirms that from the time of Charles II. to that of George I. he never knew a politician who truly held the faith of either party; and the perversity of the statesmen who led the assault against the later Stuarts threw back the cause ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... Edith, indicating one of the cases, and as my eye glanced over the names on the backs of the volumes, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, Defoe, Dickens, Thackeray, Hugo, Hawthorne, Irving, and a score of other great writers of my time and all time, I understood her meaning. She had indeed made good her promise in a sense compared with which its literal ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... said to have been quoted, as authentic history, by a certain German scholar named Goeller, in a note on a passage in Thucydides. This story, though well vouched, is hard of belief: for Knickerbocker, though excellent fooling, has nothing of the grave irony of Swift in his Modest Proposal or of Defoe in his Short Way with Dissenters. Its mock-heroic intention is as transparent as in Fielding's parodies of Homer, which it somewhat resembles, {411} particularly in the delightfully absurd description of the mustering of the ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... gifted with the true prophetic power, hereabouts should my heartless hero have stumbled on a big nugget of gold (I wrote before the Australian gold discovery), even as the shrewd Defoe invented for his Robinson Crusoe in Juan Fernandez, where gold has not yet been found, though it may be. However, I did not originally make the splendid guess, and will not now in a future edition surreptitiously interpolate such a suggestive incident, after the example of dishonest Murphy in his ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... "tickle of the sere" to handle. It has been said that, despite its alarming title, there is nothing in the book that even prudery, unless it were of the most irritable and morbid kind, could object to. There is no dwelling on what Defoe ingeniously calls "the vicious part" of the matter; there is no description of it closer than, if as close as, some passages of the Book of Proverbs (which are actually quoted), and, above all, there is no hint of any satisfaction whatever being derived from the sins by the sinner. His course ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... Purchas the best collection of them current in his day. The purely literary influence of the age of discovery persisted down to Robinson Crusoe; in that book by a refinement of satire a return to travel itself (it must be remembered Defoe posed not as a novelist but as an actual traveller) is used to make play with the deductions founded on it. Crusoe's conversation with the man Friday will be found to be a satire of Locke's famous controversy with the Bishop of Worcester. With Robinson Crusoe the influence of the ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... and excellent Montaigne, Sterne and the credible Defoe, Borrow, DeQuincey, the great Dean, The sturdy ...
— More Songs From Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... Testament Canon Unitarianism—Moral Philosophy Moral Law of Polarity Epidemic Disease Quarantine Harmony Intellectual Revolutions Modern Style Genius of the Spanish and Italians Vico Spinosa Colours Destruction of Jerusalem Epic Poem Vox Populi Vox Dei Black Asgill and Defoe Horne Tooke Fox and Pitt Horner Adiaphori Citizens and Christians Professor Park English Constitution Democracy Milton and Sidney De Vi Minimorum Hahnemann Luther Sympathy of old Greek and Latin with English Roman Mind War Charm for ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... with a Robinsonade, in which the hero, after long wandering, found rest and peace on an island in the ocean of the world, alone with himself and Nature. The readers of Robinson Crusoe were in much the same position. Defoe was not only a true artist, but a man of noble, patient character, and his romance proved a healing medicine to many sick minds, pointing the way back to Nature and a natural fife, and creating a longing for the lost ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... Two Shoes, Blossoms of Morality, Puzzle for a curious Girl), and others are given. The text is useful to refer to, as the originals are rare: the woodcuts of several of them are in this volume. "Philip Quarll," Miss Yonge says, "comes to us with the reputation of being by Daniel Defoe; but we have never found anything to warrant the supposition. It must have been written during the period preceding the first French Revolution." There is also in the Museum an edition printed in ...
— Banbury Chap Books - And Nursery Toy Book Literature • Edwin Pearson
... Defoe could have written another Robinson Crusoe with Hut Point instead of San Juan Fernandez. Our sledging supplies were mostly exhausted and we depended upon the seals we could kill for food, fuel and light. We were smutty as sweeps from the blubber ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... an airy, rustic dwelling, that brought Defoe's description of such places strongly to my recollection. The day was very warm, but the blinds being all closed, and the windows and doors set wide open, a shady coolness rustled through the rooms, which was exquisitely refreshing after the glare and heat without. ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... be marked G.O. I will carry out. Do you know Clarke's Naufragia? I am told that he asserts the first volume of Robinson Crusoe was written by the first Lord Oxford, when in the Tower, and given by him to Defoe; if true, it is a curious anecdote. Have you got back Lord Brooke's MS.? and what does Heber say of it? Write to me at Portsmouth. Ever ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... as much bitterness in his bosom against DeFoe's ingenious hero as if Robinson had been a living person instead of a living fiction, and out of this animosity grew a dream so fantastic and comical that Richard awoke himself with a bewildered laugh just as the sunrise reddened the panes of the chamber window. In this ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... to me that there are three writers which every one who wants to know how to use the English language effectively should study; and these are Shakspeare, Bunyan, and Defoe. One great secret of their hold on the popular mind is their being so radically and thoroughly English. They have the solid grain of the English oak, not veneered by learning and the classics; not inlaid with arabesques from other nations, but developing ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... smoked his peaceful pipe in the garden. John lay on an extempore sofa, made of three of our high-backed chairs and the window-sill. I read to him—trying to keep his attention, and mine too, solely to the Great Plague of London and Daniel Defoe. When, just as I was stealthily glancing at his face, fancying it looked whiter and more sunken, that his smile was fading, and his ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... called the Isle of France, to fortify it against the English. He found it was not worth fortifying, and, after an absence of three years, he returned to France, and in 1773 published his famous "Voyage to the Isle of France," and thereby made his name. It gave him a position similar to that which Defoe occupies in England, for by means of it he introduced into French literature the exotic element which he afterwards expanded in "Paul and Virginia." He was the first French writer of genius to apply the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... with the crazy brothers!' Robert Burns, the Scotch poet, was the son of a laboring man. Charles Dickens earned money by sticking labels in a shoe-blacking factory. William Shakespeare's father made gloves. Benjamin Franklin was the son of a candlemaker. Daniel Defoe, who wrote that Robinson Crusoe you love so much, helped his father around the butcher shop. John Bunyan was a traveling tinker. And Christopher Columbus was the son of a wool comber, and himself worked before ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... forerunner of the realistic novel of modern times. It portrays the life and fortunes of the picaro—the adventurer who tries all roads to fortune. Spanish in its origin, it developed into a school in which Defoe and Thackeray distinguished themselves. 'Nash,' writes the French author, 'mingled serious scenes with his comedy, in order that his romances might more nearly resemble real life.' In fact (he writes), 'Nash does not only ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Edited by Edward Everett Hale. Illustrated. In four parts. Paper, each part, 15 cents; cloth, four parts bound in ...
— Gulliver's Travels - Into Several Remote Regions of the World • Jonathan Swift |
