Dormer's Letter, as also the Mercurius
Politicus, which is in the same nature of
management as the Journal, will always be
kept, mistakes excepted, to pass as Tory
papers; and yet be disabled and enervated
so as to do no mischief, or give no
offence to the government." . . . " I
am posted for this service, among Papists,
Jacobites, and enraged high Tories;— a
generation, who I confess, my very soul
abhors; I am obliged to hear traitorous
expressions and outrageous words against
his majesty's person and government, and
his most faithful servants; and smile at all
as if I approved it. I am obliged to father
all the scandalous and indeed villanous
papers that come, and keep them by me as
if I would gather materials from them to
put them into the News; nay, I often
venture to let things pass which are a little
shocking, that I may not render myself
suspected. Thus I bow in the house of
Rimmon, and most heartily recommend myself
to his lordship's protection; as I may be
undone the sooner, by how much the more
faithfully I execute the commands I am
under."

This service was so base toward the
newspaper proprietors and the political
party deceived, and was so unworthy of
Defoe, as to have induced most people
when the letters were discovered to
indulge in the hope, that the letters might
be forgeries. It is not so, however. The
suspicion is baseless, the hope is fallacious,
and the great Daniel Defoe did really act
the unworthy part he describes, and did
really sell the birthright of his personal
honour for a mess of very dirty pottage.
Mr. Lee, who looks with a kindly eye, and
bears with a lenient hand, even upon this
aberration from the line of strict moral
rectitude on the part of his favourite author,
employed himself very earnestly and
assiduously for eighteen months on the track
thus opened out, to discover the contributions
of Defoe to the political literature of
the fifteen last years of his life. The
gatherings he has thus made, fill two large
octavo volumes of nine hundred and ninety
pages. Some of these are doubtless the
work of Defoe's hand; but as Mr. Lee had
no other clue for his guidance than that
afforded by the letters to Mr. De la Faye —
and as he can only judge by his own
construction of the internal evidence of style,
that they were written by Defoe in the
various periodicals with which he is thus
known to have been connected, it is very
possible that he may have included many
articles and papers which belong to a meaner
parentage. At all events, they can by no
means be unequivocally accepted as the
mintage of Defoe's brain, though presenting
more or less similarity in tone, manner,
and style, to hundreds of others which
are known to be his. Whether his or
not, these waifs and strays of a bygone
time form a valuable seed-ground of
history, and cannot be overlooked by any
historian who would follow up the work
begun by Macaulay, and give the world a
true account of the troublous times between
the Revolution of 1688 and the last
disappearance of the Stuarts from the scene
of British politics.

There were obscure passages in the history
of the latter years of Defoe, which the
discovery of these six letters helps materially
to elucidate. Though Defoe had been really
the good genius of Mist, and, by his
suppression of treasonable articles intended for
his journal, had saved him from imprisonment,
the pillory, if not death upon the
scaffold, Mist, when he became aware, after
seven years, of the real position which
Defoe occupied in his publishing office, and
of the personal as well as party treachery
involved, sought Defoe's life, and made a
violent attack upon him with the sword:
which Defoe repelled. At least, Mr. Lee,
citing Defoe's own words, makes out a very
good case for this supposition. And at the
last, when Defoe's life-long fight was well
nigh fought out, he was either threatened by
Mist, or supposed himself to be threatened
by Mist, to such an extent as to cause him
to lose the balance of his mind. The fact
of a persecution, real or imaginary, which
embittered the close of his life, and sent
him sorrowfully to the grave at the age
of seventy-one, rests entirely upon a letter
of Defoe to his son-in-law, Henry Baker,
written on the 12th of August, 1730, after
he had fled from his home, and hidden
himself from his family. "My mind," he
said, "is sinking under the weight of an
affliction too heavy for my strength, and I
look upon myself as abandoned of every
comfort, every friend, and every relative,
except such only as are able to give me
assistance. … I am sorry to open my
grief so far as to tell her" (his daughter
Sophie, married to Mr. Baker) "it is not
the blow which I received from a wicked,
perjured, and contemptible enemy that has
broken in upon my spirit, which, as she
well knows, has carried me through greater
disasters than these. But it has been the
injustice, unkindness, and, I must say, the