DIGITISED MANUSCRIPTS

—— . ture. In opposition to Swift, who placed his pungent wit and incisive satire at the disposal of the Tories, Defoe deluged the country with pamphlets in favour of the Whigs, and found his new pursuit more profitable than his commercial speculations, but not much safer. His sareastic humour led him to the ; pulory and renewed imprisonment. At the age of sixty he wrote Robinson Crusoe ; it is founded on the adventures of a seaman who had been abandoned on an island in the West Indies in punishment for some crime. Need I refer to the adventures of Robinson Crusoe—to his domestic pets, '@ to his meeting with Friday, to his ultimate escape ? Need I enlarge on the charms of a book that to its author brought fame and prosperity, and to endless generations affords unceasing delight ? I must still be allowed to refer to Pope, the chief intellectual link between the age of Queen Anne and our own. His brilliant poems, ‘The Rape of the Lock’ and the ‘ Dunciad,’ strike home as much now as they did then. The first of these two poems, which is founded on the fact of Lord Petre having stolen a cpiemehes lock of hair of Miss Fermor, is a satire on feminine frivolity. In a previous essay he had already characterised women as ‘ Matters too soft a lasting mark to bear, And best distinguished by black, brown, or fair.’ In the ‘Dunciad,’ which is a satire on the bad