MEMOIR OF DANIEL DE FOE. How seldom it happens that great men are born in great towns. Some secluded spot, where the influence of nature rather than of human society is felt, is commonly the nursery of genius. Great cities seem to have a depressing influence upon the human mind. The high pressure of an artificial competition, while forcing it into a premature activity, leaves its finest faculties dormant. City life thus favours the production of a crowd of mediocrities; and amid a surrounding of narrow but keenly polished wits, the dawn of a new intellectual life is exposed to the friction of a minute and sterile criticism which damps enthusiasm and crushes out the early spark of originality. Conformity to a pattern of conventional acquirements takes the place of the unfettered development of the individual nature, and a perpetual round of petty activities keeps alive a semblance of intellectual excitement which completes the absorption of the individual in the collective life. How strange that the author of Robinson Crusoe, a man distinguished above all things for individuality, and the masterpiece of whose genius is the description of a solitary life in a desert island, should have been born in London. We must regard this striking exception as a bold assertion of the sovereignty of nature over the strongest combinations of those conventional barriers by which men endeavour to restrict her sway. Daniel De Foe was born in London, in the parish of St. Giles', Cripplegate, in 1661. He died in the same parish in April, 1731. During his life of seventy years he saw, seated on the throne of England, six successive monarchs, from Charles II. to George II., and he witnessed the final phases of the greatest revolution in our history. Let no one imagine that in these stirring days the author of Robinson Crusoe lived the life of a contemplative recluse. His mind was not of a kind to be satisfied even with the activities of city life; and from about the age of twenty-one to that of fifty-four, he was incessantly engaged in the fiercest political strife of that stormy period. Daniel De Foe was the son of James Foe, a butcher, in the parish of St Giles'; his grandfather, Daniel Foe, was a yoeman of Elton, in Huntingdonshire. It i |