"Defoe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it will be sufficient to quote the authority of Dickens for the statement that no one but Defoe could have ...
— A Week at Waterloo in 1815 • Magdalene De Lancey
... 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
... by a mouse. Now the human mind, under vexation, is like that kitten, for it is apt to prey upon itself, unless drawn off by a new object, and none better for the purpose than a book. For example, one of Defoe's; for who, in reading his thrilling History of the Great Plague, would not be reconciled to ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... wholesale from 6d. to 9d. each. They are used in the East and West Indies, Ceylon, and South America, for cutting down sugar-canes and similar uses. We take the name to be Spanish; it is used by Defoe and Dampier. We only mention the article as one of the many odd manufactures made, but never ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... their son with them. His paternal grandfather was a Scotchman, and his grand parents on his mother's side were Germans, from the country bordering on the Rhine. Through the marriage of his maternal great grandmother he is distantly related to Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe. Both his parents are persons of intellectual ability, and have written verse, his mother having been a contributor to the local newspapers of this county, and ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... sixteen-six-seven respite brought; The Peace of Breda then succeeded; New York to England was conceded. Plague In sixty-five the Plague appears Fire of London And then the Fire; two awful years 1665-1666 For London—And if more you'd know Consult the Pages of Defoe. ...
— A Humorous History of England • C. Harrison
... 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 ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... exploits, the great wealth he amassed by piracy, and his reputed marriage with a Mogul princess, continued to excite the public mind long after he had disappeared from the scene. Several biographies of him were written, one of them attributed to Defoe, all of them containing great exaggerations; and a play, The Successful Pirate, was written in his honour. His biographers generally give his name as John Avery, but it was as is here given. According to the account of Van Broeck, a Dutchman, who was detained on board his ship for a time, ...
— The Pirates of Malabar, and An Englishwoman in India Two Hundred Years Ago • John Biddulph
... Jerusalem, entitled Canaan's Calamity (1598). The next, The Wonderful Year, is the account of London in plague time, and has at least the interest of being comparable with, and perhaps that of having to some extent inspired, Defoe's famous performance. Then, and of the same date, follows a very curious piece, the foreign origin of which has not been so generally noticed as that of Dekker's most famous prose production. The Bachelor's Banquet ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... Romantic Revival. James Thomson. William Collins. George Crabbe. James Macpherson. Thomas Chatterton. Thomas Percy. The First English Novelists. Meaning of the Novel. Precursors of the Novel. Discovery of the Modern Novel. Daniel Defoe. Samuel Richardson. Henry Fielding. Smollett and ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... perchance, in their elders' pastures, by which means it happened that one child used to derive no little satisfaction from the "True Account of the Apparition of Mrs. Veal to Mrs. Barlow." Told as it is with Defoe's inimitable circumstantiality, she was so far from understanding it as to rather more than half believe it. She knew well that ghosts at night-time, robed in white, were fabulous and never to be thought of, especially ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... published the narrative in which Defoe came, perhaps even nearer than in Moll Flanders, to writing what we to-day call a novel, namely: The Fortunate Mistress; or, a History of the Life and Vast Variety of Fortunes of Mademoiselle de' ...
— The Fortunate Mistress (Parts 1 and 2) • Daniel Defoe
... said 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 fulfillment would have been a disappointment. She had ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... 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, Sir,' said they; 'they have been lost some time.' I concluded only some poachers ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... 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
... 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 the pamphlet exposed or refuted somebody, even ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... 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 them ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... Doctor Paley, the King of Prussia, the King of Poland, Cicero, Monsieur Gautier, Hippocrates, Machiavelli, Milton, Colley Cibber, Bojardo, Gregory Nazianzenus, Locke, D'Alembert, Boccaccio, Daniel Defoe, Erasmus, Doctor Smollett, Zimmermann, Solomon, ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... for the union of England and Scotland, he took part in the war of pamphlets inaugurated and sustained by prominent men on both sides of the Border, and he crossed swords with no less redoubtable a foe than Daniel Defoe in his Advantages of the Act of Security compared with those of the intended Union (Edinburgh, 1707), and A Vindication of the Same against Mr De Foe (ibid.). A minor literary work of Abercromby's was a translation of Jean de Beaugue's Histoire de la guerre d'Ecosse (1556) which appeared ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... 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, eloquent ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Pigeon Creek, Ind., and during his short stay Abraham Lincoln was his most attentive pupil. Two years after, Abraham went to school for several months, and in 1824 his school days came to an end. His time at school did not exceed twelve months altogether. In the meantime he had read Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe," Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," AEsop's "Fables," The Bible, and Weems's "Life of Washington." In 1824 his father, in need of his assistance as a bread-winner, began to instruct him in the carpenter trade. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... ... become a great adventurer like my favourite heroes in the picaresque novels of Le Sage, Defoe, Smollett ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... part in 1800. It is the best known of his six novels. Though the scene is laid in Philadelphia, Brown embodied in it his experience of the yellow fever which raged in New York in 1799. The passage describing this epidemic can stand beside Defoe's or Poe's or Manzoni's similar descriptions, for power in setting forth the horrors of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... being the son of a soldier, who, unable to afford the support of two homes, was accompanied by his family wherever he went. A lover of books and of retired corners, I was as a child in the habit of fleeing from society. The first book that fascinated me was one of Defoe's. But those early days were stirring times, for England was then engaged in the ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... Roberts, was merely another mask for the creator of Robinson Crusoe. Although most of the first volume is of minor literary importance, the second section which appeared in 1728 as The History of the Pyrates commenced with a life "Of Captain Misson and His Crew," one of Defoe's most remarkable and neglected works of fiction. In much the same manner and at the same time that John Gay was satirizing Walpole's government in The Beggar's Opera, Defoe began to use his pirates as a commentary on the injustice and hypocrisy ...
— Of Captain Mission • Daniel Defoe
... delight his works have given them for decades. It is more gratifying still to rest confident in the belief that, in Mark Twain, America has contributed to the world a genius sealed of the tribe of Moliere, a congener of Le Sage, of Fielding, of Defoe—a man who will be remembered, as Mr. Howells has said, "with the great humorists of all time, with Cervantes, with Swift, or with any others worthy his company; none of them was his ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... to neutralize the misteachings of Adam Smith, of Darwin and Defoe. Smith's "Wealth of Nations" presumed the material debasement of darker peoples of colonial populations, or, in lieu thereof, such debasement of Slav, Serf or Serbian as would compensate the vanity of the superior people. Indirectly, Darwin taught, that the Negro closely approached ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... burial-places could hold them; and no ceremonial attended them, but they were rudely flung anywhere by anybody (no nominative is given), with no accustomed voice of mourning, but in gloomy silence. It is like Defoe's picture of the dead-cart in the plague of London. Such is ever the end of departing from God—songs palsied into silence or turned into wailing when the judgment bursts; death stalking supreme, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... most frequently recommended are Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, The Arabian Nights, Don Quixote, Boswell's Life of Johnson, White's Natural History of Selborne, Burke's Select Works (Payne), the Essays of Bacon, Addison, Hume, Montaigne, Macaulay, ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... 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 find that there were sovereigns ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... English prose, the language of journalism, of science, of social intercourse, came into being 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. When we recall the scanty term of years within which was produced the ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... rocky island, where "gulls and other sea-birds with long wings," build their nests, becomes in pure French prose an orderly park arranged "for the pleasure of the eye." In the eighteenth century, contemporary novelists, themselves belonging to the classic epoch, Fielding, Swift, Defoe, Sterne and Richardson, are admitted into France only after excisions and much weakening; their expressions are too free and their scenes are to impressive; their freedom, their coarseness, their peculiarities, would form blemishes; ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... 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 wind of a collection being taken up for Wesley—who in ...
— Epistle to a Friend Concerning Poetry (1700) and the Essay on Heroic Poetry (second edition, 1697) • Samuel Wesley
... thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... Everybody's Business is Nobody's Business, by Andrew Moreton. This was one of Defoe's many aliases—like ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... 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 on ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... done any thing to incur, with Defoe, that hideous disfigurement, which constrained him to draw upon assurance—to feel "quite unabashed," and at ease upon that article. I was never, I thank my stars, in the pillory; nor, if I read them aright, is it within ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... and Spenser to Wordsworth and Byron, prose sacred and profane from Bacon and Jeremy Taylor to Burke and Edward Irving, the drama in its two flourishing periods, the familiar essay from Steele and Addison to Lamb and Leigh Hunt, the novel from Defoe to Sir Walter Scott. This does not begin to suggest Hazlitt's versatility. His own modest though somewhat over-alliterative words are that he has "at least glanced over a number of subjects—painting, poetry, ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... village of Eden Valley was never quieter. Several young men of the highest consideration were waiting within call of the millinery establishment of the elder Miss Huntingdon, on the chance of being able to lend her "young ladies" stray volumes of Rollin's Ancient History, Defoe's Religious Courtship, or such other volumes as were likely to fan the flame of love's young dream in their hearts. I saw Miss Huntingdon herself taking stock of them through the window, and as it were, separating the sheep from the goats. For she was a particular woman, Miss Huntingdon, and ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... the development of prose. Periodical literature reached its perfection early in the century in The Tatler and The Spectator of Addison and Steele. Pamphleteers flourished throughout the period. The homelier prose of Bunyan and Defoe gradually gave place to the more elegant and artificial language of Samuel Johnson, who set the standard for prose writing from 1745 onward. This century saw the beginnings of the modern novel, in Fielding's Tom Jones, Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... these by including them in his book list or in his collected works; nor did he list his youthful novel Incognita (1691), if indeed he had a copy of it. Such omissions were later made by men with much greater novels to their credit. In the sales catalogues listing the books of Defoe and Fielding, one looks in vain for Robinson Crusoe ...
— The Library of William Congreve • John C. Hodges
... and 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 ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... of 1665 is said, however, to have been brought in merchandise directly from Holland, where it had been smouldering for several years. Its ravages in London have often been described, and Defoe found in the calamity a subject for a special story on history. Probably he was not more than six years old when the plague appeared; but he assumes throughout the pose of a respectable and religious ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... masters of good estates."[14] In England stories of the rapid advance of people of humble origin in Virginia gave rise to the absurd belief that the most influential families in the colony were chiefly composed of former criminals. Defoe in two of his popular novels, gives voice to this opinion. In Moll Flanders we find the following: "Among the rest, she often told me how the greatest part of the inhabitants of that colony came hither in very indifferent circumstances ...
— Patrician and Plebeian - Or The Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... comes De Foe's best fragment of fictitious history.[1] The 'Memoirs of a Cavalier' is a very amusing book, though it is less fiction than history, interspersed with a few personal anecdotes. In it there are some exquisite little bits of genuine Defoe. The Cavalier tells us, with such admirable frankness, that he once left the army a day or two before a battle, in order to visit some relatives at Bath, and excuses himself so modestly for his apparent neglect of military duty, that we cannot refuse to believe in him. A novelist, we say, would ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... coupled with a general plan a speciality or two. For instance, Dyce, who laid a collateral stress on Shakespeariana; Ireland, who made himself strong in Leigh Hunt and Hazlitt; Crossley, who had a peculiar affection for Defoe; Bliss, who collected books of characters and books printed at Oxford or just before the Great Fire of 1666; Bandinel, who was smitten by the charms of the Civil War literature; Corser, whose bibliographical sweethearts were Nicholas Breton and Richard Brathwaite; ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... seemed 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
... was also a book of Defoe's called an "Essay on Projects," and another of Dr. Mather's called "Essays to do ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... 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 recognized organ of ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... 46 Defoe's Captain Singleton is an imaginary account of the adventures of certain pirates in different parts of the world. In the extract here given they are lying in Chinese waters. 'William,' one of their crew, has gone ashore to ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... conception of him in Dante and Tennyson; the feigned ignorance of how Er returned to the body, when the other souls went shooting like stars to their birth,—add greatly to the probability of the narrative. They are such touches of nature as the art of Defoe might have introduced when he wished to win ...
— The Republic • Plato
... 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 ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... all that, sir," answered the young soldier who had first spoken. He had long, delicate hands and eager, restless eyes. "War does bring out heroism. So does pestilence and famine. Read Defoe's account of the Plague of London. How men and women left their safe homes, to serve in the pest-houses, knowing that sooner or later they were doomed. Read of the mothers in India who die of slow starvation, never allowing a morsel of food to pass their lips so that they may save up ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... was translated into Latin by G. F. Goffeaux, and this version has been 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 ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... his own would be pretty much a matter of guess-work. Charles Reade, in his "Man and Wife," shows an intimate knowledge of medical science where he philosophizes on the effects of an irregular life and of over-physical training. His logic is sound science. Defoe and Cervantes show a like intelligent insight as to medicine; and it was not without reason that Sydenham, the English Hippocrates, advised a student of medicine who entered his office as a student to begin the study of ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... which are still left at the disposal of the duly-gifted writer of romance is the Pirate. Not but that many have written of pirates. Defoe, after preparing the ground by a pamphlet story on the historic Captain Avery, wrote The Life, Adventures, and Piracies of Captain Singleton. Sir Walter Scott made use in somewhat the same fashion of the equally ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... Crusoe, Daniel Defoe, lived in England from 1661 to 1731. He was a brave, liberty-loving man who was always in opposition to the tyranny of the government, and was many times punished for his independent speech and lively interest in ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... 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 Pope's translation of ...
— Young Folks' History of England • Charlotte M. Yonge
... would sit for hours, with our eyes fixed upon the old adventurer, drinking in his words, while he, pleased at the interest which he excited, would puff slowly at his pipe and reel off story after story of what he had seen or done. In those days, my dears, there was no Defoe to tell us the wonders of the world, no Spectator to lie upon our breakfast table, no Gulliver to satisfy our love of adventure by telling us of such adventures as never were. Not once in a month did a common newsletter fall into our hands. ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 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 ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... In "The First Christmas Tree," as in many others of these stories, a third person is the narrator. But the hero may tell his own adventures. "I did this. I did that. Thus I felt at the conclusion." Instances are Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" and Stevenson's "Kidnapped." But whether in the first or third person, the story holds us ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... of Calypso has the tinge of nautical fancy. In like manner the story of Robinson Crusoe is that of a sea-faring people. We see in it the ship-wrecked man, the lone island, the struggle with nature for food and shelter. But Defoe has no supernatural realm playing into his narrative—no beautiful nymph, no Olympian Gods. That twofold Homeric conception of an Upper and Lower World, of a human and divine element in the great experience, ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... Spectator still furnish rare material to many a popular magazine writer of the day, who sometimes does little more than dilute a paper in these and other rare repertories of the style and wit of a golden age. We meditated offering various extracts from Swift and Daniel Defoe; but our space limits us to one, and the following may ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... the man who can—give us a fresh experience on anything that interests us overrides everybody else. A great peril escaped makes a great story-teller of a common person enough. I remember when a certain vessel was wrecked long ago, that one of the survivors told the story as well as Defoe could have told it. Never a word from him before; never a word from him since. But when it comes to talking one's common thoughts,—those that come and go as the breath does; those that tread the mental areas and corridors with steady, even foot-fall, an interminable ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... 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 of men of mark. Towards the end ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... fair number of people to-day who cherish that ridiculous dream of an oceanic solitude. We remember that whenever a storyteller wishes to make enchantment seem thoroughly genuine, he begins upon an island. One might say, if in a hurry, that Defoe began it, but in leisure recall the fearful spell of islands in the Greek legends. It is easily understood. If you have watched at sea an island shape, and pass, forlorn in the waste, apparently lifeless, and with no movement to ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... tale has all the direct simplicity and truth to human nature which mark the ancient literature of Iceland. Defoe might have envied the profusion of detail; "The large chest with a lock, and the small box," and so on. Some of the minor portents, such as the disturbances among inanimate objects, and the appearance of a glow of mysterious light, "the Fate Moon," recur in modern tales of haunted houses. The ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... 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 ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... Ways and Means." The volume was written by a member of Parliament in the days of William and Mary, who desired to apply principles of political economy to the maintenance of English wealth and liberty. It has been wrongly scribed to Defoe; and its suggestion of the plan a trading Corporation for solution of the whole problem of relief to the poor who cannot work, and relief from the poor who can, might indeed make another chapter in Defoe's "Essay on Projects." The chapter, which gives the Political Arithmetic ...
— Essays on Mankind and Political Arithmetic • Sir William Petty
... further Adventures, with Life of Defoe, &c. Upwards of 60 fine Woodcuts, from designs by Harvey and ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... book there are a couple of letters from a volume of the "Travels in England" which were not by Defoe, although resembling Defoe's work so much in form and title, and so near to it in date of publication, that a volume of one book is often found taking the place of a volume of the other. A purchaser of Defoe's "Travels in England" has therefore to take care that he is not buying one of the mixed ...
— From London to Land's End - and Two Letters from the "Journey through England by a Gentleman" • Daniel Defoe
... phrase of Sam Weller's?" I gave it to him without difficulty and then an inspiration occurred to me. The stammering tongue had plundered Father Prout and the prophet Malachi, Dickens and Ingoldsby, Pope and Smollett and Defoe, and as it chanced he had made no literary allusion in English which did not recall some long familiar text to my mind, I offered a bargain. If O'Hanlon would give me the classical stuff in respect to which I was in Pagan darkness, I would give him the English with which he was less well-acquainted. ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... from a hovel, The lowest of the low, The father of the Novel, Salvation's first Defoe, Eight blinded generations Ere Armageddon came, He showed us how to meet it, And Bunyan ...
— The Years Between • Rudyard Kipling
... the hero of Defoe's fiction of the name, a shipwrecked sailor who spent years on an uninhabited island, and is credited with no end of original devices in providing for ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Newman's Lectures, and Herbert Spencer's Social Statics. The only third decade worthy to be named with those of 1590 and 1850 is that which opens in 1705, and is illuminated by the names of Pope, Shaftesbury, Swift, Arbuthnot, Defoe, Steele, Addison, and Berkeley. It is pleasant to compare these three magnificently flowering epochs, but not profitable if we attempt to weigh one against the other. They are comparable only in ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... 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. ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... story, written with studied simplicity of style, much in Defoe's vein of apparent sincerity and scrupulous veracity; while for practical instruction it is even better than ...
— The Dash for Khartoum - A Tale of Nile Expedition • George Alfred Henty
... host of political pamphleteers in the seventeenth century are excluded, with the exception of Lilburne and Winstanley, whose work deserves better treatment from posterity than it received from contemporaries. Defoe's vigorous services for the Whigs are unnoticed, and the democratic note in much of the poetry of Burns, Blake, Byron and Shelley is left unconsidered, and the influence of these poets undiscussed. The anti-Corn Law rhymes of Ebenezer Eliot, and the Chartist songs of Ernest Jones were notable inspirations ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... 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 of his birth until ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... plague which follows, shows not only Boccaccio's inventive power,—as being, like that of Defoe of the plague of London (which is a curious parallel to this) altogether imaginary, since the writer was at Naples during the whole period of the pestilence,—but also that it was a part indispensable of the entire scheme, and described with all its ghastly minuteness simply to enhance ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... 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
... famous—or, rather, notorious—as a writer of 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 ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... 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 played ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... insincerity which are put at so high a value in mixed households of men and women. She desired that Rachel should think, and for this reason offered books and discouraged too entire a dependence upon Bach and Beethoven and Wagner. But when Mrs. Ambrose would have suggested Defoe, Maupassant, or some spacious chronicle of family life, Rachel chose modern books, books in shiny yellow covers, books with a great deal of gilding on the back, which were tokens in her aunt's eyes of harsh wrangling and disputes about facts which had no such importance as the moderns claimed ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... for the music of prose. Take the chapter in "Lavengro" of how the screaming horror came upon his spirit when he was encamped in the Dingle. The man who wrote that has caught the true mantle of Bunyan and Defoe. And, observe the art of it, under all the simplicity—notice, for example, the curious weird effect produced by the studied repetition of the word "dingle" coming ever round and round like the master-note in a chime. Or take the passage about Britain towards the end of "The ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Thucydides; see also Grote's History of Greece, Chap. XLIX. Of the great plague of London (1665) the most realistic description is Defoe's ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... mention, however, a note-book and a watch which Gideon Spilett had kept, doubtless by inadvertence, not a weapon, not a tool, not even a pocket-knife; for while in the car they had thrown out everything to lighten the balloon. The imaginary heroes of Daniel Defoe or of Wyss, as well as Selkirk and Raynal shipwrecked on Juan Fernandez and on the archipelago of the Aucklands, were never in such absolute destitution. Either they had abundant resources from their stranded vessels, in grain, cattle, ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... Flaubert in his "Madame Bovary," and passing through the whole line of their studies in morbid anatomy, as the "Germinie Lacerteux" of the Goncourts, as the "Bel-Ami" of Maupassant, and as all the books of Zola, you have portraits as veracious as those of the Russians, or those of Defoe, whom, indeed, more than any other master, Zola has made me think of in his frankness. Through his epicality he is Defoe's inferior, though much more than his equal in the range and implication ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... rolled 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 joined ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... legends of this kind; and it may be remembered how Defoe, in his "Tour through Great Britain," speaks of a certain camp called Barrow Hill, adding, "they say this was a Danish camp, and everything hereabout is attributed to the Danes, because of the neighbouring Daventry, which they suppose to be built ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... 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, ...
— George Borrow in East Anglia • William A. Dutt
... 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 was a year or two over thirty, and he published ...
— An Essay Upon Projects • Daniel Defoe
... appearance. For he told me of instances where, by prayers and long 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. ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... intimate, not merely with their thoughts, and the public events of their lives, but with themselves—Augustine, Milton, Luther, Melancthon, George Herbert, Baxter, Howe, Owen, Leighton, Barrow, Bunyan, Philip and Matthew Henry, Doddridge, Defoe, Marvel, Locke, Berkeley, Halliburton, Cowper, Gray, Johnson, Gibbon, and David Hume,[23] Jortin, Boston, Bengel, Neander, etc., not to speak of the apostles, and above all, his chief friend the author of the Epistle to the Romans, whom ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... a tale by Daniel Defoe. Robinson Crusoe ran away from home, and went to sea. Being wrecked, he led for many years a solitary existence on an uninhabited island of the tropics, and relieved the weariness of life by numberless contrivances. At length he met a human being, a young Indian, whom he saved from death on a Friday. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... 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, ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... English novelist, historian and pamphleteer, was born in 1660 or 1661, in London, the son of James Foe, a butcher, and only assumed the name of De Foe, or Defoe, in middle life. He was brought up as a dissenter, and became a dealer in hosiery in the city. He early began to publish his opinions on social and political questions, and was an absolutely fearless writer, audacious and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... unconventional, and graphic, that a reader sitting at his ease in his own room became, as it were, an eyewitness of those appalling scenes. His accounts of that fire, and of the events following it, are such as Defoe would have given if he had been a New York reporter. Still struggling for existence, he went to the expense (great then) of publishing a picture of the burning Exchange, and a map of the burnt ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... of the works of Daniel Defoe formed by Mr. Walter Wilson, his biographer, which at his sale realised the sum of 50l., and which had been rendered still further complete by the addition of upwards of forty pieces by the recent possessor, when sold by Messrs. Puttick and Simpson, on Wednesday, the 5th instant, ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.12.15 • Various
... been the editor's wish to let Mr. Franchere speak for himself. To preserve in the translation the Defoe-like simplicity of the original narrative of the young French Canadian, has been his chief care. Having read many narratives of travel and adventure in our northwestern wilderness, he may be permitted to say that he has met with ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere
... and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner. By DANIEL DEFOE. With a Biographical Account of Defoe. Illustrated by Adams. Complete Edition. ...
— Harper's Young People, June 1, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... with Daniel Defoe's description of a Gravesend Tiltboat in the year 1724, as recorded by ALPHA in Vol. ii., p. 209., I think some of your readers may be pleased to learn that it is quite possible that "it may be a plain relation of matter of fact," as De Foe was engaged ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 54, November 9, 1850 • Various
... of Falstaffe's papers is his twenty-fourth: his discussion of the recently published memoirs of the deaf and dumb fortuneteller, Duncan Campbell, memoirs which we know to have been written by Daniel Defoe. And from Falstaffe's conspicuous reference to Robinson Crusoe in the paper, it seems evident that he also knew the identity of the author. What we have then is, in effect, a contemporary review of Defoe's book. Maintaining an ...
— The Theater (1720) • Sir John Falstaffe
... 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 ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... to devote my leisure to running rapidly through the works of the leading English novelists, from Daniel Defoe to the present day, in the hope of stimulating my latent ideas and of getting a good grasp of the general tendency of literature. For some time past I had avoided opening any work of fiction because one of the greatest faults of my youth had been that I invariably and unconsciously mimicked ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 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 Englishman."[197] He was not often so careless, ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... 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 ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... Harley and Defoe, preserved at Welbeck Abbey, and now published by the Historical MSS. Commission, reveals the intimate relations which existed for public purposes ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... Prince Miss Mulock Little Minister, The J.M. Barrie Little Men Louisa May Alcott Little Women Louisa May Alcott Oliver Twist Charles Dickens Pilgrim's Progress John Bunyan Pinocchio C. Collodi Prince of the House of David Rev. J.H. Ingraham Robin Hood Retold Robinson Crusoe Daniel DeFoe Self Raised E.D.E.N. Southworth Sketch Book Washington Irving St. Elmo Augusta J. Evans-Wilson Swiss Family Robinson Wyss Tale of Two Cities Charles Dickens Three Musketeers, The Alexander Dumas Tom Brown at Oxford Thomas Hughes Tom Brown's School Days Thomas Hughes Treasure ...
— Daddy Takes Us to the Garden - The Daddy Series for Little Folks • Howard R. Garis
... 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, original prefaces. 555pp. ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... zest and charm to our literature. As Dryden grew to old age, these younger men were already beginning to make themselves heard, though none had done great work. In poetry there were Prior, Gay, and Pope, while in prose we find names that stand high in the roll of fame,—the story-teller Defoe, the bitter Swift, the rollicking Dick ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... 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
... best known to us as the author of Robinson Crusoe, a book which has been the delight of generations of boys and girls ever since the beginning of the eighteenth century. For it was then that Defoe lived and wrote, being one of the new school of prose writers which grew up at that time and which gave England new forms of literature almost unknown to an earlier age. Defoe was a vigorous pamphleteer, writing first on the Whig side and later for the ...
— Memoirs of a Cavalier • Daniel Defoe
... gracious oak-beamed houses. It has filled our popular 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 ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... was 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 ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... and Hume than with Hobbes and Filmer. Nor has the eighteenth century an historical profundity to compare with that of the zealous pamphleteers in the seventeenth. Heroic archivists like Prynne find very different substitutes in brilliant journalists like Defoe, and if Dalrymple and Blackstone are respectable, they bear no comparison with masters like Selden and Sir ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... 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 tucked ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... writers of Harrington's time and later that Stevenson learned something of his craft. Bunyan and Defoe should be particularly mentioned, and that later excellent worthy, Captain Charles Johnson, who compiled the ever-memorable Lives of Pirates and Highwaymen. Mr. George Meredith is the chief of those very few modern writers whose ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... either of those nations, but because Spaniards and Russians are very unlike Englishmen. That at least is the opinion of the sagacious Pepys on the later of these incidents. 'Lord! to see the absurd nature of Englishmen, that cannot forbear laughing and jeering at anything that looks strange.' Defoe says that the English are 'the most churlish people alive' to foreigners, with the result that 'all men think an Englishman the devil.' In the 17th and 18th centuries Scotland seems to have ranked as a foreign country, and the presence of Scots in London was much resented. ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... on, till 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 ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... 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 ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... W. H. Hudson's "Introduction to the Study of Literature" he had high esteem. This book he has carefully annotated. Of Mr. Hudson's remarks on the contrast between the style of Milton and that of Dryden, between Hooker and Defoe, he writes: "A comparison of remarkable discernment. The difference between the Miltonic and Drydenic styles, i.e., pre-1660 and post-1660, was simply due to the change in ideas caused by the reaction against Puritanism." Agreeing with Hudson that there ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... go." In the nature of things the History of the Union would have become a romance, with that impudent, entertaining rogue, Ker of Kersland, and his bewildered Cameronians, for the heroes: with Hamilton the waverer, and the dark, sardonic Lockhart of Carnwath, and Daniel Defoe as the English looker-on. The study of Highland history led to the reading of the Trial of James of the Glens, and the vain hunt for Alan Breck, and so ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... 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 Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... 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 ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... well-nigh a necessity in education. Girls may occasionally be excused, but never boys. It ought to be unnecessary, therefore, to say that some of the narrative passages of Crusoe in New York are taken, word for word, from the text of Defoe. If I do state this for the benefit of a few unfortunate ladies who are not familiar with that text, it is because I think no one among many courteous critics has ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... each was a waste of time. He never opened a book, save a manual of husbandry or a ready reckoner; he could conceive of no reason for walking, unless it were the business of the farm. Nothing irritated him more than to see Desmond stretched at length with his nose in Mr. Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, or a volume of Hakluyt's Voyages, or perhaps Mr. Oldys's Life of Sir Walter Raleigh. And as he himself never dreamed by day or by night, there was no chance of his divining the fact that Desmond, on those ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... Liverpool Street Station, is located the house, chapel, burial-grounds, and tomb of John Wesley. Across the street, in an old Nonconformist cemetery, are the graves of James Watt, Daniel Defoe, and John Bunyan. Across the narrow street to the north is the tabernacle of Whitefield. We learned that Friday, July 7th, was reopening day for Wesley's Chapel. What a distinguished body of persons we found at this meeting! Dr. ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... the hero and title of a novel by Daniel Defoe. Robinson Crusoe is a shipwrecked sailor, who leads a solitary life for many years on a desert island, and relieves the tedium of ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... trial and discouragement, his position and surroundings were not a very promising school for the training of an author. The book he produced is, in our judgment, not unworthy of comparison with the immortal work of Defoe, with this qualification in our author's favor that "Robinson Crusoe" is a fiction, while Glazier's is a true story of real adventure undergone by the writer and his comrades of ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... of Defoe in his Original Power of the People of England (Works by Hazlitt, vol iii. See especially ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen |
