SHORTER NOTICE
The Incredible De Foe. By William Freeman. (Herber, Jenkins. us.) FOR once this sort of faney title is justified. When we add up all Defoe's activities, it is very difficult to believe that one man could have done so many different things so copiously and so well. And there is such variety in Defoe, such a deal to be said about him in a dozen spheres of attivity, that there is always room for a competent new book about him, even though nothing fresh is revealed or an illuminating analysis suggested. Mr. Freeman writes as an admiring fellow-journalist, staggered by the amount of work Defoe did, sympathetic towards his appalling blunders—it was sheer journalistic genius which made The Shortest Way a disastrous mistake—but he does not try to make a saint of him. The freshness of the approach, unencumbered by any need to assess style (though this is not forgotten); or to make heavy weather over the tangled politics of the period, should recommend this book to the general reader. Mr. Freeman Ettendles well a vast mass of material, and manages to disengage a solid and lively if not a lovable figure—it is difficult to have any personal feeling about Defoe—moving in a milieu made actual enough to serve as an adequate biographical background. It is pleasant to find the Scottish episodes given their due place, and if a little less might have been made of the Restora- tion scene to which Defoe ,scarcely belonged, a little more of his political and economic sagacity and of the -mystic trends, in the main the picture is firm and well balanced.
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