legal editions to the author's profit, but
was pirated on every hand, and sold in
penny copies at the corner of every street.
"It is very probable," says Mr. Lee, "that
from the invention of printing to 1701, an
equal number of copies of any book had
never been sold within the space of one
year."

This tract did more for Defoe than make
him popular with the multitude; it gained
him the friendship of the king, the man
whom of all others in England, he most
esteemed, and in whose cause he had
wrought and fought, and the success of
whose principles he looked upon as
identified with the happiness of his
country. The king sought and obtained his
friendship, and was accustomed to consult him
privately on affairs of state; but Defoe
never divulged their confidence, and he
only informed the world incidentally after
the king's death, that on the subject of the
French war of 1703, to which he had
opposed himself in several pamphlets, the
king asked him, this war having been
irrevocably determined upon, to draw up a
scheme of operations by which it might be
made as little onerous as possible to the
people, in which he recommended an attack
against the Spanish West Indies, which the
king fully approved. Had his majesty
lived Defoe was to have had an honourable
part in its execution. Reverting after
the king's death to the kindnesses he had
received at his hands, Defoe wrote in his
Review, "I am not at all vain in saying I
had the honour to know more of his majesty
than some of those who insulted him knew
of his house, and I think, if my testimony
was able to add to his bright reputation, I
could give such particulars of his being not
a man of morals only, but of serious piety
and religion as few kings in the world, in
these latter ages of time, can come up to."

The death of King William was a serious
blow to the rising political fortunes of Defoe.
But there was much work to do, and he
did it in his own way, though doubtful
whether the favour of the new court would
be extended to a man who was so strong
an opponent of the pretensions of her
majesty's Roman Catholic father, to which
her majesty herself, Protestant as she was,
was supposed to have a leaning. The
Whigs who served King William were
dismissed, and a Tory ministry appointed
within two months after Queen Anne's
accession; facts that prefigured to Defoe
that a stormy time was before the nation,
and before him as an individual whose duty
and avocation and sole business in life it
was to keep the nation true to the principles
of the Revolution. The opening of
the year 1702 had seen Defoe the honoured
and confidential friend of a powerful sovereign,
and apparently on the high road to
fame and fortune. The king's death
changed all. The court knew him not,
except to mistrust him. The new House
of Commons, if not in a Jacobite majority,
had a majority opposed to the Whig and
Protestant principles, that drove out James
the Second and seated William the Third
on the throne. This majority favoured
Roman Catholicism and English High
Churchism, and was bitterly opposed to
the Dissenters, of whom Defoe was the
most eminent champion. But he held on
the even tenor of his way; convinced, and
as he said "positively assured," that he
was in the right. Queen Anne had been
less than six months' upon the throne
when Defoe published the pamphlet
already alluded to, The Shortest Way with
the Dissenters. Defoe's intention, when he
eventually surrendered to take his trial for
this publication, was to justify his
pamphlet, and to prove that everything he had
said in jest and irony, as to the best mode
of exterminating the Dissenters, had been
said in solemn earnest by leading members
of the High Church party. But he was
prevailed upon to withdraw the plea of
justification, and simply confessing the authorship,
to throw himself upon the mercy of
the queen. The result proved that he
acted unwisely. There was to be no mercy
on this occasion. He was sentenced to
pay a fine of two hundred marks, to stand
three times in the pillory, to be imprisoned
during the queen's pleasure, and to find
sureties for his good behaviour for seven
years. The sentence was intended to be
an infamous one; and it was infamous—not
to Defoe, but to the government which
pronounced it. He was removed from the
dock to Newgate, there to remain for
twenty days, until he was placed in the
pillory. Even in this dreary interval his
pen was not idle, for he found time and
means to complete and send to the printer,
a work on which he had been previously
engaged, entitled The Shortest Way to
Peace and Union, by the author of The
Shortest Way with the Dissenters. The
object of this tract was to reconcile the
Church to the Dissenters, and the
Dissenters to the Church. "Thus the noble
Christian peacemaker," as Mr. Lee well
says, "endeavoured to return good for
evil to the enemies who had endeavoured
to crush him, and to the friends who had