"Adventures of Colonel Singleton;" "The Fortunes of Moll Flanders;" "The History of Colonel Jack;" "The Fortunate Mistress;" "The Memoirs of a Cavalier;" and "The History of the Plague." The list of De Foe's published pamphlets, books, &c., is almost incredibly large. About four hundred different treatises are known to be from his pen. he died on the 24th of April, 1731, at the age of seventy, in the parish of St. Giles' Cripplegate, London, in which he was born, leaving a widow and several children. A great-grandson of his was alive in 1856.
There is one peculiarity about the reputation of De Foe—it has never varied. He is regarded with the same kind of admiration now that he always was, and to very much the same extent. His genius is essentially popular, i.e., it is capable of being appreciated by every one, and therefore there can be no mistake about its quality. Yet De Foe is not a writer of uniform excellence. In fact he is the very reverse. Nor is it at all wonderful that one who wrote so much should have written a great deal indifferently; but wherever circumstances or the subject-matter permitted, De Foe was always pithy, graphic, agreeable, and humorously sensible beyond all his contemporaries. It cannot be said with justice that he is absolutely poor or bad in any one of his multitudinous tracts. He discussed almost every question, and generally brought to bear upon each a highly respectable amount of knowledge, great good sense, and vigorous thought. At no period of his life a bookworm, so at no period either was he an idler. Whatever he could pick up in the way of observation or conversation with his fellow-men, must have been carefully treasured up in his memory. He thus supplied in a great measure the deficiencies of his meagre scholarship, and could enliven pamphlet, essay, or novel with happy allusions to facts of common life, and graphic turns of speech winch amply compensated for his poverty in the "purple patches" of classicism which streaked and coloured the pages of his contemporaries. In politics De Foe was a whig, according to the true meaning of the term. He belonged, however—in so far as he was a partisan, though a man of high genius can never be wholly such—to that religious sect whose political sentiments in our day approach radicalism. He was a dissenter both by parentage and on principle, and was never afraid to defend the denomination from which he sprung. But if De Foe had only been such, posterity would hardly have cared to remember him. It is as a novelist, as the author of the most popular narrative of fictitious adventure which has ever appeared in the English language, that he claims our principal consideration. It is universally admitted that, in the invention of minute circumstances which beguile the fancy into a belief of the indubitable reality of the scenes and incidents described, De Foe has never had an equal. He possessed the rare art of concealing his imagination, and giving everything a plain, prosaic, matter-of-fact appearance. His originality did not he on the surface, but lurked unseen in the multiplicity of petty details, or clothed itself in the commonest garb. In reading "Robinson Crusoe" we never think of whether or not the book displays originality. We feel that in style, manner, interest, &c., it is unlike any other work, and are content to be fascinated without inquiring the cause thereof. The language, as in all De Foe's writings, is pure idiomatic English—plain, solid, and graphic, though often carelessly colloquial. It only remains to say that De Foe's private character was in keeping with that exhibited in the better class of his writings. He was a quick, well-meaning, honest, sturdy Englishman, who despised meanness, hypocrisy, and, in truth, vice in general. In spite of the extreme coarseness of some of his sketches, a feeling of true religion animated the man, though circumstances rarely permitted it to operate in all its natural fervour.—J. M. R.
DEGEER, Ch. See Geer, Carl von.
DEGENFELD, Christopher Martin, Baron von, lived in the seventeenth century. He fought in Germany, Hungary, and Bohemia, under Wallenstein and Tilly, and afterwards in the Low Countries, under Spinola. He subsequently served under Gustavus Adolphus and Louis XIII., who conferred upon him the rank of lieutenant-general of the German cavalry. In 1643 he fought for Venice, cut in pieces the army of Pope Urban VIII., and distinguished himself by the remarkable valour he displayed against the Turks. Degenfeld died in 1653.—His son, Ferdinand, who died in 1710, was counsellor to four prince-palatines, and was employed in various missions to William, prince of Orange.—J. T.
DEGEN, Carl Ferdinand, a Danish mathematician, born in 1766 in Brunswick, where his father was violinist. He came to Denmark at an early age, when his father was appointed to the chapel royal. He first studied law, then theology, and finally devoted himself to philology and philosophy, and to the physical and mathematical sciences. He was mathematical tutor to Prince Christian, afterwards Christian VIII., and subsequently was appointed instructor to Prince Frederik Ferdinand. In 1802 he was teacher of mathematics and physics in the school at Odensee, in 1806 head master of Viborg, and in 1814 mathematical professor at the university of Copenhagen. His writings consist of treatises on mathematics or physics in Danish, Latin, or German, programmes or initiatory addresses, partly published in periodicals, but in no larger collected form. He died in 1825.—(Nordisk Con. Lex.)—M. H.
* DEGER, Ernst, a German fresco painter, was born at Osnabrück in Hanover in 1809. The academies of Berlin and Düsseldorf dispute with each other the glory of having imparted his artistical education, and perhaps each has a share in it. It was at Rome that the prince of Fürstemberg noticed the promising artist; and it is to this enlightened patron of art that Deger's aptness in fresco painting owed the first and most favourable opportunity to display itself. At Remagen on the Rhine, Deger, together with other artists from the school of Düsseldorf, carried on the internal decoration of the principal church—a work which is styled in Germany the monument of national modern painting. This great success brought Deger further employment from the king of Prussia, by whom he was intrusted with the decoration of some of the halls of Stolzenfels castle. Some of these have but recently been completed, and are said to be in every way worthy of the genius and ability that produced the former works.—R. M.
DEGERANDO, Marie Joseph, was born at Lyons, February 29th, 1772, and during his early education in that city, displayed a laborious and subtile mind, capable of applying itself with wonderful ease to a large variety of subjects. In 1793 when Lyons was besieged by the republican party, he took arms in defence of his native city, and upon its surrender fled to Switzerland and Naples, remaining in exile three years, until the establishment of the directory permitted his return to France. Restless and without settled avocation, he wrote a prize essay upon the question—"What is the influence of words and signs upon the faculty of thought?" and entered as a chasseur in the army of Italy. The soldier received intelligence of the prize the philosopher had gained, soon after the battle of Zurich, in which he took a part. Attracting the attention of the government in 1799, he was attached to the ministry of the interior by Lucien Bonaparte, and in 1805 accompanied Napoleon in his journey to Italy, taking part in the French administration in that country. In 1811 he received the dignity of councillor of state. Although temporarily put aside on the fall of the empire, his character and talents continued to secure for him high public offices, and in 1837 he was raised to the peerage. As a philosopher, Degerando was one of those thinkers who prepared the way for the overthrow of the sensationalism of Condillac, by sowing within its own circle the seeds of thoughts destined to effect its ruin. The light of a higher philosophy than that representing sensation as the foundation of all knowledge, very gradually, although never very perfectly, dawned upon Degerando during the development of his speculations. In his first essay, while asserting that sensation is the sole origin of knowledge; that all reasoning consists in substituting words which the mind can readily comprehend for those which it cannot; and that so-called general ideas are nothing but adaptations of words to particular objects—he stopped short of Condillac's famous maxim that a science well elaborated is nothing but a language well formed, and regarded as chimerical any attempt to apply algebraical processes to metaphysical inquiries. Degerando's most famous work is his "Histoire comparée des systèmes de philosophie relativement aux principes des connaissances humaines," Paris, 1804. In this work he did good service to philosophy by calling attention to the writings of many great men neglected by the popular school; by giving fairer, although still partial and incomplete accounts of both Kant and Locke, and by tempering the sensational theory with a recognition of the activity of the mind itself as a source of knowledge. A work of Degerando's, entitled "Du Perfectionnement moral et de l'education de soi-même,"
