"The narrative manner of De Foe has a naturalness about it beyond that
of any other novel or romance writer. His fictions have all the air of
true stories. It is impossible to believe, while you are reading them,
that a real person is not narrating to you everywhere nothing but what
really happened to himself. To this the extreme _homeliness_ of their
style mainly contributes. We use the word in its best and heartiest
sense,--that which comes _home_ to the reader. The narrators everywhere
are chosen from low life, or have had their origin in it; therefore they
tell their own tales, (Mr. Coleridge has anticipated us in this remark,)
as persons in their degree are observed to do, with infinite repetition,
and an overacted exactness, lest the hearer should not have minded, or
have forgotten, some things that had been told before. Hence the
emphatic sentences marked in the good old (but deserted) Italic type;
and hence, too, the frequent interposition of the reminding old
colloquial parenthesis, 'I say,' 'Mind,' and the like, when the
story-teller repeats what, to a practised reader, might appear to have
been sufficiently insisted upon before: which made an ingenious critic
observe, that his works, in this kind, were excellent reading for the
kitchen. And, in truth, the heroes and heroines of De Foe can never
again hope to be popular with a much higher class of readers than that
of the servant-maid or the sailor. Crusoe keeps its rank only by tough
prescription; Singleton, the pirate--Colonel Jack, the thief,--Moll
Flanders, both thief and harlot,--Roxana, harlot and something
worse,--would be startling ingredients in the bill-of-fare of modern
literary delicacies. But, then, what pirates, what thieves, and what
harlots is _the thief, the harlot_, and _the pirate_ of De Foe? We would
not hesitate to say, that in no other book of fiction, where the lives
of such characters are described, is guilt and delinquency made less
seductive, or the suffering made more closely to follow the commission,
or the penitence more earnest or more bleeding, or the intervening