France; and the narrative has an air of authenticity which imposed upon Dr. Mead, who had been appointed to report upon desirable precautions. He quotes it as an authority in his ‘Discourse on the Plague’ (1744). Two other remarkable books have been assigned to Defoe. The ‘Memoirs of a Cavalier’ appeared in 1720. The preface states that the memoirs had been found ‘in the closet of an eminent publick minister … one of King William's secretaries of state.’ The publisher identifies the author with Andrew Newport, second son of Richard Newport of High Ercall, Shropshire, created Lord Newport, 1642. Andrew Newport (d. 1699) was the younger brother of the Earl of Bradford, who was born in 1620. As the cavalier says that he was born in 1608, and served under Gustavus Adolphus, the identification is impossible (some letters of Andrew Newport are given in Hist. MSS. Comm. 5th Rep.). The account of the civil wars contains many errors, and might have been easily compiled from published documents, while the personal anecdotes introduced are much in the style of Defoe. The authorship must be doubtful. The memoirs of Captain George Carleton [q. v.], often attributed to Defoe, are certainly genuine. The ‘New Voyage round the World,’ 1725, is the last of these fictitious narratives which need be mentioned.
Defoe wrote memoirs of Daniel Williams, founder of the library for Curll in 1718; and Curll also published the history of Duncan Campbell in 1720. It is remarkable that at this period, Defoe (if Mr. Lee is right in attributing the article to him) published a bitter attack upon Curll in ‘Mist's Journal’ for 5 April 1718 (Lee, ii. 32, where 1719 is given in error). The author complains of the indecency of contemporary literature in a strain which comes rather oddly from the author of catch-penny lives of criminals. Defoe, however, was in his own view a sincere and zealous moralist. His books upon such topics were voluminous and popular. To his ‘Family Instructor,’ published in 1715, he added a second volume in 1718; and in 1727 he published a new ‘Family Instructor,’ directed chiefly against popery and the growing tendency to Socinianism and Deism. Two volumes of the ‘Complete English Tradesman’ appeared in 1725 and 1727. Lamb (‘The Good Clerk,’ first published in Leigh Hunt's ‘Reflector,’ 1811) has pronounced an unusually severe judgment on the morality of these volumes, which, it must be admitted, is not of an elevated tendency; but perhaps it should rather be called prosaic and prudential than denounced as base. It is of the kind current in his class, and apparently sincere as far as it goes. The same may be said of the ‘Religious Courtship,’ 1722, and the ‘Treatise concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed,’ 1727. Defoe's religious views, otherwise those of the orthodox dissenters, were marked by a queer admixture of popular superstition. His love of the current ghost stories and delight in the vulgar supernaturalism appear in these treatises: ‘The Political History of the Devil,’ the ‘System of Magic,’ and an ‘Essay on the Reality of Apparitions,’ afterwards called ‘The Secrets of the Invisible World disclosed,’ which appeared in May 1726, December 1726, and March 1727. At the same time, his intimate knowledge of contemporary life and manners gives interest to books of a different class; the ‘Tour through Great Britain,’ of which three volumes appeared in 1724–5–6; the ‘Augusta Triumphans, or the Way to make London the most flourishing City in the Universe,’ 1728; a ‘Plan of English Commerce,’ 1728, and various pamphlets dealing with schemes for improving the London police. Defoe's writings are of the highest value as an historical indication of the state of the middle and lower classes of his time. Defoe had been a diligent journalist until 1725. The attacks in the press provoked by his apparent apostasy had died out about 1719 (Lee, i. 309), as his energies had been diverted from exciting political controversy. At the end of 1724, Mist was for a fourth time in prison. While there he drew his sword upon Defoe, who repelled the attack, wounded Mist, and then brought a surgeon to dress the wound (Lee, i. 394; for Defoe's account see Applebee's Journal). In all probability Mist had discovered Defoe's relations with the government, and failed to see that they called for gratitude. Soon afterwards Defoe's writings in newspapers ceased. His last regular article in ‘Applebee's Journal’ appeared 12 March 1726, and in the following November he complains (preface to tract on Street Robberies) that he could not obtain admission to the journals ‘without feeing the journalists or publishers.’ Mr. Lee plausibly conjectures that Mist had revealed Defoe's secret to them, and that they thereupon ‘boycotted’ him as a recognised agent of ministers. In June 1725 he had adopted the pseudonym of Andrew Moreton, which he afterwards used frequently for purposes of concealment. He appears at this period to have been fairly prosperous. In a ‘character of Defoe’ (Add. MS. 28094, f. 165), apparently the report of some hostile agent about 1705, it is said that he lives at Newington Green, at the house of his father-in-law, who is ‘lay elder in a conventicle.’ If Defoe married Annesley's daughter, this must
