unless the draper indulged a sudden whim of his own: this was a formal contract, that the draper should pay, within twenty years, upon twenty certain days, a penny doubled. A knave, in haste to sign, is no calculator; and, as the contemporary dramatist describes one of the arts of those citizens, one part of whose business was

To swear and break: they all grow rich by breaking!' the draper eagerly compounded. He afterwards grew rich.' Audley, silently watching his victim, within two years, claims his doubled pennies, every month during twenty months. The pennies had now grown up to pounds. The knave perceived the trick, and preferred paying the forfeiture of his bond for 5007. rather than to receive the visitation of all the little generation of compound interest in the last descendant of 2000/., which would have closed with the draper's shop. The inventive genius of Audley might have illustrated that popular tract of his own times, Peacham's Worth of a Penny:' a gentleman, who, having scarcely one left, consoled himself by detailing the numerous comforts of life it might procure in the days of Charles II.

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This philosophical usurer never pressed hard for his debts; like the fowler, he never shook his nets lest he might startle, satisfied to have them, without appearing to hold them. With great fondness he compared his bonds to infants, which battle best by sleeping.' To battle is to be nourished, a term still retained at the university of Oxford. His familiar companions were all subordinate actors in the great piece he was performing; he too had his part in the scene. When not taken by surprise, on his table usually lie opened a great Bible, with bishop Andrew's folio sermons, which often gave him an opportunity of railing at the covetousness of the clergy! declaring their religion was a mere preach,' and that the time would never be well till we had queen Elizabeth's protestants again in fashion.' He was aware of all the evils arising out of a population beyond the means of subsistence, and dreaded an inundation of men, spreading like the spawn of a cod. Hence he considered marriage with a modern political economist, as very dangerous; bitterly censuring the clergy, whose children he said never thrived, and whose widows were left destitute. An apostolical life, according to Audley, required only books, meat, and drink, to be had for fifty younds a year! Celibacy, voluntary poverty, and all the mortifications of a primitive christian, were the virtues practised by this puritan among his money bags.

Yet Audley's was that worldly wisdom which derives all its strength from the weaknesses of mankind. Every thing was to be obtained by stratagem, and it was his maxim, that, to grasp our object the faster, we must go a little round about it. His life is said to have been one of intricacies and mysteries, using indirect means in all things; but, if he walked in a labyrinth, it was to bewilder others; for the clue was still in his own hand; all he sought was that his designs should not be discovered by his actions. His

word, we are told, was his bond; his hour was punctual; and his opinions were compressed and weighty; but, if he was true to his bond-word, it was only a part of the system to give facility to the carrying on of his trade, for he was not strict to his honour; the pride of victory, as well as the passion for acquisition, combined in the character of Audley, as in more tremendous conquerors. His partners dreaded the effects of his law-library, and usually relinquished a claim rather than stand a suit against a latent quibble. When one menaced him by showing some money-bags, which he had resolved to empty in law against him, Audley, then in office in the court of wards, with a sarcastic grin, asked 'Whether the bags had any bottom?" Aye!' replied the exulting possessor, striking them. In that case I care not,' retorted the cynical officer of the court of wards; for in this court I have a constant spring, and I cannot spend in other courts more than I gain in this.' He had at once the meanness which would evade the law, and the spirit which could resist it.

The career of Audley's ambition closed with the extinction of the 'court of wards,' by which he incurred the loss of above 100,000l. On that occasion he observed that his ordinary losses were as the shavings of his beard, which only grew the faster by them; but the loss of this place was like the cutting off a member; which was irrecoverable.' The hoary usurer pined at the decline of his genius, discoursed on the vanity of the world, and hinted at retreat. A facetious friend told him a story of an old rat, who, having acquainted the young rats that he would at length retire to his hole, desiring none to come near him, their curiosity, after some days, led them to venture to look into the hole; and there they discovered the old rat sitting in the midst of a rich parmesan cheese. It is probable that the loss of the last 100,000/. disturbed his digestion, for he did not long survive his court of wards.

ROBINSON CRUSOE.

ROBINSON CRUSOE, the favourite of the learned and the unlearned, of the youth and the adult; the book that was to constitute the library of Rousseau's Emilius, owes its secret charm to its being a new representation of human nature, yet drawn from an existing state: this picture of self-education, self-inquiry, selfhappiness, is scarcely a fiction, although it includes all the magic of romance; and is not a mere narrative of truth, since it displays all the forcible genius of one of the most original minds our literature can boast. The history of the work is therefore interesting. It was treated in the author's time as a mere idle romance, for the philosophy was not discovered in the story; after his death it was considered to have been pillaged from the papers of Alexander Selkirk, confided to the author; and the honour, as well as the genius, of De Foe, were alike questioned.

The entire history of this work of genius may now be traced, from the first hints to the mature state, to which only the genius of De Foe could have wrought it. Captain Burney, in the fourth

volume of his "voyages and discoveries to the South Sea," has arranged the evidence in the clearest manner, and finally settled a point hitherto obscure and uncertain. I have little to add; but, as the origin of this universal book is not likely to be sought for in Captain Burney's valuable volumes of voyages, here it may not be out of its place.

The adventures of Selkirk are well known; he was found on the desert island of Juan Fernandez, where he had formerly been left, by Woodes Rogers and Edward Cooke, who in 1712 published their voyages, and told the extraordinary history of Crusoe's prototype, with all those curious and minute particulars which Selkirk had freely communicated to them. This narrative of itself is extremely interesting; and has been given entire by Captain Burney; it may also be found in the Biographia Britannica.

In this artless narrative we may discover more than the embryo of Robinson Crusoe.-The first appearance of Selkirk, "a man clothed in goats' skins, who looked more wild than the first owners of them." The two huts he had built, the one to dress his victuals; the other to sleep in; his contrivance to get fire by rubbing two pieces of pimento wood together: his distress for the want of bread and salt till he came to relish his meat without either; his wearing out his shoes, till he grew so accustomed to be without them, that he could not for a long time afterwards, on his return home, use them without inconvenience; his bedstead of his own contriving, and his bead of goat-skins; when his gunpowder failed, his teaching himself by continual exercise to run as swiftly as the goats; his falling from a precipice in catching hold of a goat, stunned and bruised, till, coming to his senses, he found the goat dead under him; his taming kids to divert himself by dancing with them and his cats; his converting a nail into a needle; his sewing his goat-skins with little thongs of the same; and, when his knife was worn to the back, contriving to make blades out of some iron hoops. His solacing himself in this solitude by singing psalms, and preserving a social feeling in his fervent prayers And the habitation which Selkirk had raised, to reach which, they followed him, " with difficulty climbing up and creeping down many rocks, till they came at last to a pleasant spot of ground, full of grass and of trees, where stood his two huts, and his numerous tame goats shewed his solitary retreat;" and, finally, his indifference to return to a world, from which his feelings had been so perfectly weaned.-Such were the first rude materials of a new situation in human nature: an European in a primeval state, with the habits or mind of a savage. The year after this account was published, Selkirk and his adventures attracted the notice of Steele; who was not likely to pass unobserved a man and a story so strange and so new. In his paper of "the Englishman," Dec. 1713, he communicates further

particulars of Selkirk. Steele became acquainted with him; he says, that "he could discern that he had been much separated from company, from his aspect and gesture. There was a strong but cheerful seriousness in his looks, and a certain disregard to the ordinary things about him, as if he had been sunk in thought. The man frequently bewailed his return to the world, which could not, he said, with all its enjoyments, restore him to the tranquillity of his solitude." Steele adds another curious change in this wild man, which occurred some time after he had seen him. Though I had frequently conversed with him, after a few months absence, he met me in the street, and, though he spoke to me, I could not recollect that I had seen him. Familiar converse in this town had taken off the loneliness of his aspect, and quite altered the air of his face. De Foe could not fail of being struck by these interesting particulars of the character of Selkirk; but probably it was another observation of Steele, which threw the germ of Robinson Crusoe into the mind of De Foe. "It was matter of great curiosity to hear him, as he was a man of sense, give an account of the different revolutions in his own mind in that long solitude."

The work of De Foe, however, was no sudden ebullition; long engaged in political warfare, condemned to suffer imprisonment, and at length struck by a fit of apoplexy, this unhappy and unprosperous man of genius on his recovery was reduced to a comparative state of solitude. To his injured feelings and lonely contemplations, Selkirk in his desert isle, and Steele's vivifying hint, often occurred; and to all these we perhaps owe the instructive and delightful tale, which shews man what he can do for himself, and what the fortitude of piety does for man. Even the personage of Friday is not a mere coinage of his brain: a Mosquito-Indian described by Dampier was the prototype. Robinson Crusoe was not given to the world till 1719; seven years after the publication of Selkirk's Adventures. Selkirk could have no claims on De Foe; for he had only supplied the man of genius with that which lies open to all; and which no one had, or perhaps could have, converted into the wonderful story we possess but De Foe himself. Had De Foe not written Robinson Crusoe, the name and story of Selkirk had been passed over like others of the same sort; yet Selkirk has the merit of having detailed his own history, in a manner so interesting, as to have attracted the notice of Steele, and to have inspired the genius of De Foe.

After this, the originality of Robinson Crusoe will no longer be suspected; and the idle tale which Dr. Beattie has repeated of Selkirk having supplied the materials of his story to De Foe, from which our author borrowed his work, and published for his own profit, will be finally put to rest. This is due to the injured honour and the genius of De Foe.