Defoe's Captain Singleton. Edited, with Introduction and Roles, by H.
Halliday Sperling. (Walter Scott.)—The minor novels of Defoe, especially "Moll Flanders" and "Rosana," are too gross in incident, and too monotonous in the delineation of vice and crime, to attract the modern reader. Captain Singleton is more characteristic of the writer's better qualities, and of that love of foreign travel in an arm-chair, with the help of maps, that gives such life to the pages of "Robinson Crime." That, and the so-called "History of the Plague," are the famous works that keep Defoe's memory green, and it is interesting to remember that they were written in his old age. So, unfortunately for his reputation, were some of the works in which, although he does not pander to indecency, he dwells with wearisome minuteness on vicious scenes. It wan a coarse age, and it would be impossible to transcribe is a modern journal even the title-pages of some of his volumes or pamphlets. When Macaulay wrote of " Rosana" and "Colonel Jack" an utterly wretched and nauseous, and in no respect beyond the reach of Afra Behn, he did not do justice to Defoe's peculiar craft as a delineator of low types of character whose aim is to write with the veracity of the chronicler. It was not high art that produced Mrs. Veal's ghost ; but the literary craft which deceives readers is not without merit, and may be compared to that exorcised by some painters who have so represented fruit upon the canvas that birds are said to have peeked at it. Mr. Sperling fails to benefit Defoe by praising his style at the expense of Addison, or by the absurd statement that men of letters in bin age were almost wholly given over to rococo triviality or elephantine pseudo-classicism. His introduction does not contain the whole truth about Defoe ; perhaps it was unnecessary that it should ; and this well-printed edition of Captain Singleton will be welcome to many readers who at present know little of its famous author beyond the one book which is familiar to every schoolboy-
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