Dear Wilson, -- _Lightning_ I was going to call you. You must have thought me negligent in not answering your letter sooner. But I have a habit of never writing letters but at the office; 'tis so much time cribbed out of the Company; and I am but just got out of the thick of a tea-sale, in which most of the entry of notes, deposits, etc., usually falls to my share.
I have nothing of De Foe's but two or three novels and the "Plague History. " [1] I can give you no information about him. As a slight general character of what I remember of them (for I have not looked into them latterly), I would say that in the appearance of _truth,_ in all the incidents and conversations that occur in them, they exceed any works of fiction I am acquainted with. It is perfect illusion. The _author_ never appears in these self-narratives (for so they ought to be called, or rather auto-biographies), but the _narrator_ chains us down to an implicit belief in everything he says. There is all the minute detail of a log-book in it. Dates are painfully pressed upon the memory. Facts are repeated over and over in varying phrases, till you cannot choose but believe them. It is like reading evidence given in a court of justice.
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