for us in this sketch to refer to all his labours, for he was a far greater literary phenomenon for productiveness than even Sir W. Scott or Southey. We shall, however, omit none of the most important.

The high Tory party had soon tired of the Revolution, and William found both plentiful and malignant assailants. Among their most current nicknames for him was foreigner and alien; and, as De Foe narrates, a vile abhorred pamphlet, in very ill verse, came from one Mr. Tutchin, called the Foreigners,' in which the author fell personally upon the king himself, and then on the Dutch nation; reproaching his Majesty with crimes that his worst enemy could not think of without horror, and summing all up in the odious name of FOREIGNER. Such conduct filled De Foe, as he says, with rage, and he wrote the "True-Born Englishman.'

This was his first truly popular work. Hitherto he had plied in the shoals and narrows, but now he put boldly out to sea. His cause was good, and he sincerely loved it; he set himself to defend a great and noble man, and he succeeded. He covered the opposite party with ridicule; he showed how foolish it was to suppose such a person as a true-born Englishman could exist, seeing that every nation under heaven had intermixed with us, and he concluded with some strong and hearty lines, which, being the best, as well as the essence of the whole, we will quote:

Then let us boast of ancestors no more,
Or deeds of heroes done in days of yore;
For if our virtues must in lines descend,
The merit with the families would end,
And intermixtures would most fatal grow,
For vice would be hereditary too.

Could but our ancestors retrieve their fate,
And see their offspring thus degenerate;
How we contend for birth and names unknown,
And build on their great actions, not our own;
They'd cancel records, and their tombs deface,
And openly disown the vile degenerate race;
For fame of families is all a cheat-

'Tis personal virtue only makes us great.'

The poem had numerous faults, as had all his poetical works; so many and so apparent, as he says, that even his enemies could not avoid blundering on them. But it contained so much sense, and did so much good to the liberal cause, that the king himself noticed him, made a friend of him, and employed him on several services.' What these were we can never know, but that they

were important he himself informs us. He seems to have honoured, and even loved, the so-called stern William, and never suffered the royal memory to be abused. We do not at all doubt that he told the truth when he said that the king would never have suffered him to be so persecuted and ill-treated as he afterwards was, if he had been spared. He adds, with true sorrow, 'Heaven for our sins removed him in judgment.' He wrote many political pamphlets at this time, but we hasten on to a more stormy period of his life.

On Queen Anne's accession, she having been brought up in the High Church sect, the zealous of that party-as the hot men of all sides do-thinking the game in their own hands, and all other people to be under their feet, began to run into mad extremes. The Nonconformists immediately saw that they had acted foolishly in leaving the whip in their enemies' hands. They were as completely shut out of all places and chance of rising in the State now, as they had been in the worst days of Papal tyranny. Their hard gained Act of Toleration was nullified as much as possible; and De Foe raised a cry of warning.

But the Dissenters were like a rope of sand, and would nowise hold together. Some among them, esteeming their views so far as not to conform to the Church, but not esteeming them so far as to forego worldly distinctions for the sake of them, allowed occasional conformity, as it was called, by which, for the sake of office they attended church, took the sacrament kneeling, and otherwise conformed to the Establishment, though at heart Dissenters.

Now De Foc hated half-men, as all sincere men do. He had -(and we take this opportunity to say, that in speaking of his opinions we use his own language as much as possible, though without the confusing inverted commas) he had written a pamphlet on this subject in 1697, when Sir Humphrey Edwin, the lord mayor, took the sword and traps of office to church in the morning, and to the chapel at Pinner's Hall, Broad-street, in the afternoon, of the same Sunday. But the question dropped at that time, and there was no particular occasion to revive it till 1701, when Queen Anne having ascended the throne, and Church pretensions having grown higher, it was necessary to stand more sternly than ever to principle.

In this year Sir Thomas Abney was lord mayor, and followed Edwin's example: he both conformed to the Establishment and dissented from it, which De Foe took to be cause for scandal. It does not appear that he found any other fault with Abney. We all know something of him from his munificent and Christian treatment of Dr. Watts, whom he invited into his family after a violent fever, and kept in his house till he re

covered, and for many years after. But in this occasional conformity he was wrong, and De Foe acted the part of a faithful monitor in reproving him for it. It was an ill example for the chief magistrate of the chiefest city in Christendom to dodge religions in this way; to communicate in private with the Church of England to save a penalty, and then to go back to Dissenters from that Church. De Foe, feeling strongly on the subject, addressed a new edition of his Enquiry' to Sir Thomas Abney's minister, at Pinner's Hall, the Rev. John Howe, who had been a Churchman, but was afterwards a persecuted Nonconformist. De Foe's object was to draw from Howe some defence, if he approved, of the practice, or to give him an opportunity to declare against it if he did not, without the offence of a voluntary announcement.

But he got no satisfaction: he ought to have chosen a younger man; for John Howe was gone on too far in his way to heaven to be dragged back to the controversies of this troublesome world. Doubtless the eminent piety of the author of 'The Tears of the Redeemer over Lost Souls' caused De Foe to address his preface to him, and he not unnaturally expected to be answered when Howe published a tract on the subject. However, the great theologian merely said that he would not enter into controversy on the circumstantials of religion, believing that every man must answer to God, who would not be severe on a wrong judgment.

De Foe returned to the charge. To Howe's somewhat strong expressions concerning him personally, as also to his arguments on what did not touch the question, he was brief, his object being the question itself. And he maintained, as we think, with great clearness and truth, that he who dissents from an established church, except from a true principle of conscience, is guilty of sin in making a wilful schism; that he who conforms to an established church against his conscience is guilty of a great sin; that he who dissents and conforms at one and the same time must be guilty of one of these sins; and that he who has committed either of these sins ought not to be received again on either side, except as a penitent.

And whereas, in his tract, Mr. Howe had spoken of the differences between the Church and Dissenters, as though the points at issue were but trifles, De Foe said, that if they differed only about trifles, the Dissenters would have much to answer for in making so large a chasm in the Church. But he denied that they were such, and stated that he dissented because of the episcopal hierarchy, political ordination, and royal supremacy-because of the imposition of things owned to be indifferent, as terms of communion, and the like; adding, that

no one pretends to dissent in everything, but that the above were not, in his opinion, trifles: if they were, he would conform. To all this, however, Mr. Howe made no further reply, and the Government soon took up the matter, nearly passing a bill to prevent occasional conformity in future.

But this was not De Foe's aim. He saw the scandal of occasional conformity as regarded the Dissenters themselves, but he also felt bitterly the crying shame of excluding the most liberal body of Protestants in the country from all place and power in the Government. For surely the nation cannot be said to be represented in Parliament, while one sect holds the keys of the great gates of the State, and lets none in but through their baptisms, confirmations, and other formalities of religion.

The part which De Foe took in this question, however, was badly received by some of the best men among the. Nonconformists of that day, and made them less willing to assist him when he fell into trouble for their sake, which happened soon afterwards. For, finding that their enemies grew fiercer every day, and that the Act of Toleration was being continually narrowed, he fell, he says, into a sort of fury, and produced one of the most extraordinary pamphlets that ever issued from the press.

He made himself thoroughly acquainted with the writings of the High Flyers, or, as we should say, High Churchmen, and collecting all their venom, put it into form. And when Sacheverell preached a sermon called the Political Union,' in which he urged all true sons of the Church to raise the banner of defiance against the Dissenters, De Foe sallied out with his 'Shortest Way with the Dissenters,' and made some jump on their seats. He pretended to be a High Flyer himself, and began by rejoicing that the Dissenters had, on Anne's accession, lost the power they had enjoyed nearly fourteen years, to eclipse, buffet, and disturb the poorest of all churches. But now, he said, seeing their day was over, they were all for peace and mutual forbearance, wishing, like Esop's cock after he was unperched, to preach up union. But no, gentlemen,' he exclaimed, 'your day of grace is over: you should have practised moderation and charity, if you expected any yourselves-it is now our turn.' He then went on to speak of the fatal lenity (?) which had been shown them by James I. and Charles I., in their being suffered to colonize New England, instead of being sent to the West Indies (the transportation of those times), or by some other method cleared out of the nation! If this had been done,' he said, 'the anointed of God would never have been murdered (Charles); we should have had no sordid impostor set up (Cromwell);' and more to that effect.

After this he turned to the reasons offered why the Dissenters should be tolerated, answering them plainly. To the reason that they were very numerous, and made a great part of the nation, he said that the Protestants in France had been more so, but the French king had effectually cleared the nation of them on St. Bartholomew's day, and did not seem to miss them; and the more numerous they were, the more dangerous, and therefore the more need to suppress them :-adding, that if they were to be allowed only because their number was an obstacle to their suppression, then it ought to be tried whether they could be suppressed or not. To the reason that it would be inconvenient to have internal strife in war time, he adduced the success of suppressing the old coinage during the late war, and said that the nation could never enjoy peace till the spirit of Whiggism and schism was melted down like the old money.

He then undertook, in his character of Churchman, to show the queen what she ought to do as a member of that Church, whose doctrines he took care to show were charity and love. This was, in short, to renew fire and faggot; and he excused it by showing how toads and snakes, being viperous, are destroyed out of charity to our neighbours, and whereas these are noxious to the body and poison life only, the others poison the soul. It is in vain, he pursued, to trifle in this matter. If the gallows, instead of fines, were the reward of going to a conventicle to preach or hear, there would not be many sufferers: the spirit of martyrdom is over; they that go to church to be chosen sheriff's or mayors would go to forty churches rather than be hanged. He then turned with his satire on the system of fines. We hang men,' he said, 'for trifles, and banish them for things not. worth naming, but an offence against God and the Church shall be bought off for five shillings! this is such a shame to a Christian government, that it is with regret I transmit it to posterity.' He then reproved such Dissenters as said with Mr. Howe that the differences between the sects were on trifles-making use of it as an argument why they should be compelled to give up such whimsies. So he closed his case, with a few sentences calling on all good Churchmen to uproot the schismatics and shut the door of mercy.

The effects of this pamphlet were extraordinary. Every one was deceived. The Low Church party were terrified at this bold proposition of red-hot persecution, fearing to be forced into it, or compelled to join the Dissenters. The Dissenters fell into a kind of stupor at so positive a threat of war to their barren liberties. And the High Church people were delighted to have their secret wishes so thoroughly set forth; Sacheverell himself not having dared hitherto to name the stake and gallows.