7The Life and surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe is one of the boots which seem to be written for all time. Like Shakespeare, Pilgrim's Progress, and, if we may venture on the comparison, Holy Scripture, it never gets old, but is ever fresh and racy; the style is plain and homely, but beautiful and generally clear- paragraph after paragraph occurs in which no word exceeds two syllables- and though delightful to all classes, it addresses itself especially to those with the simplest comprehension. The minuteness of detail, the leaf-painting, so to speak, with which the hero's occupations are described, his odd reflections and quaint moralizing, but especially the characteristic energy with which he sets about repairing the several disasters he meets with; and the simplicity, not without a little unconscious bravado, with which he shoulders his two guns and girds on his old ship's cutlass; and the ingenuity, not unmixed with simplicity, with which he sets about the construction of his boat, and afterwards of his battery of old ship's muskets, when he discovers the visits of the cannibals to his island; his attachment to his goats and his parrot, and above all to Friday, are all so many justifications of the favour he finds with seafaring men and boys, and with the illiterate classes generally. The reader's attention is fixed by an artless chain of incidents natural under the supposed circumstances, and told in a concise manner without embellishment, but deriving interest from the mode of telling the story; ''under the guidance of natural reason," to use the words of Marmontel, " it points to the Almighty as the source of man's capabilities;" or as Sir Walter Scott has it in the Ballantyne Edition, " The ways of Providence are simply and pleasantly vindicated, and a lasting and useful moral conveyed through the channel of an interesting and delightful story." While no doubts exist about the literary parentage of the book - for Defoe was the acknowledged author-it will ever remain a mystery whether it is a pure fiction founded on the general idea of Selkirk's story, or the result of a more minute knowledge of Ins adventures in all their details. His own preface, in which he assumes to be merely the Editor of the work, probably originated this later notion; it is very characteristic: " If ever the story of any private man's adventures in the world were worth making public, the Editor of this work thinks that it will be so. The wonders of his life exceed all that he thinks are to be found extant; the life of one man being scarce capable of greater variety. The story is told with modesty, with seriousness, and with religious application of events to the uses to which wise men always apply them, viz. to the instruction of others by example, and to justify and honour the wisdom of Providence in all the variety of their circumstances, let them happen how they will. The Editor believes the thing to be a just history of facts, neither is there any appearance of fiction in it. However this may be, for all such things may be disputed, he is of opinion that the improvement of it, as well to the diversion as the instruction of the reader, will be the same; and as such, he thinks, without further compliment to the world, he does them a great service in the publication."