unhealthy was the place, so wretched the diet, that a serious illness ensued, and though his body was spotted with ulcers, all help from the doctor was denied. His property was confiscated as well. When at last an inquiry was instituted into his case, it was ascertained that the libel which had led to his capture and imprisonment was not of his production at all! But even when released the sufferer found it impossible to obtain restitution of his sequestrated estate, and was forced to retire to the country and languish upon the miserable remnant of his fortune.

Verily it is a galling thing when, instead of receiving rewards, writers find that they have to pay heavy penalties for their works. Whilst some are crowned in the Capitol, others are unceremoniously thrust into a dungeon. The difference in literary desert may be small, or it may be wholly in favour of the captive, but the world has strange ways, and not unfrequently punishes where it ought to praise.

More especially must it be provoking for a man to be dragged down from the heights of Parnassus by an officer, and bundled off to some dank, dripping cell, because he happens to have incurred the censor's suspicions, or because he has written some innocent verses which are supposed to be loaded with high treason. Certain writers have frequently suffered in this respect. Béranger, for instance, was oft in danger, oft in woe. One edition of his poems cost him an imprisonment in Sainte Pélagie, and another a dose of duress in La Force, in addition to a fine of 10,000 francs: the latter indeed his friends cheerfully paid, but the personal penalty they could not undergo, otherwise there would probably have been admirers enough to divide the infliction amongst themselves at the rate of a few days apiece. A subscription captivity would be a benevolent novelty.

De Foe's political writings, and, scarcely less, his political labours, brought down upon him a storm of hostility under which he would have been wrecked had not his courage been lofty, and his resolve unconquerable. He was subjected to annoyances of the most ingenious description. Creditors were set upon him. Dormant claims were stirred up, and sleeping lions roused to attack him. Sham writs were issued and pretended officers sent to arrest him. He was sometimes waylaid or dogged into dark passages and assailed. His house was marked for destruction by the rabble. He was repeatedly cautioned by his friends not to show himself in the streets, and at one time he had some intention of remaining at home at night, and of wearing a piece of armour on his back by day; adopting the first of these precautions because he felt persuaded that his foes dare not do their work in open light, and the second because he suspected they were too cowardly to stab him in front. In one number of his Review he observes that he had before him at the time fifteen letters from gentlemen who had faithfully promised to come and kill him by a certain day; some of these individuals being so good as to apprise him of the mode in which the ceremony was to be executed. 'Thus,' said he, 'I am ready to be assassinated, arrested without warrant, robbed and plundered by all sides. I can neither trade nor live; and what is this for? Only as I can yet see, because there being faults on both sides, I tell both sides of it too plainly.' Once indeed he had to make the acquaintance of that 'Hieroglyphic state machine contrived to punish fancy in '-that is to say, the Pillory-in commemoration of which he wrote a hymn, the like whereof is not to be found in Watts or Wesley, in Cowper or Keble. Poor Daniel, in fact, had very bitter experience of

1 Wilson's Life of De Foe, vol. iii. pp. 187, 191.

dungeon life. At one time for debt, at another for libel; now for misfortune, now for sedition, he went into captivity with a certain amount of Jewish regularity. He was accustomed to be ruined. Most of the debts he discharged cost him, as he intimates, forty shillings in the pound, and his creditors half as much to recover them.

But De Foe had other sorrows. The keenest, cruellest blow of adversity came from his own offspring. To prevent the confiscation of his remaining property, he conveyed it to one of his sons under an express trust, legally evidenced, that it should be held for the benefit of his (Daniel's) wife and unmarried daughters. When the danger was passed the unnatural fellow repudiated the obligation. He converted the property to his own use. He suffered his two spinster sisters and 'their poor dying mother to beg their bread at his door, and to crave, as if it were an alms, whilst he was bound under hand and seal, besides his most sacred promises, to supply them with money'himself at the same time living in profusion! 'It is too much for me,' continued the heart-broken father. I can say no more.' And then writing to his son-in-law, Mr. Baker, he implores him, as a dying request, to stand by the wronged ones when he was gone, and assist them by his counsel.

But though a prison is by no means an inviting place, the Muses have not shrunk from visiting their favourites there, nor have more celestial Presences refrained from hallowing the gloomiest cells by their gladdening company and their inspiring communications. Amongst dungeon productions may be reckoned some of the noblest works which ever came from human pen. Raleigh's History of the World is one of those grand colossal structures which, eyeing it without knowledge of the conditions under which it was reared, we might have

ascribed to some literary giant working in the prime of his powers, with all his energies at full command, and with access to every quarry where pure marble or imperishable adamant could be procured. And yet it was the labour of one lone man, worn with toil, enfeebled in body, broken in fortune, bruised in spirit, and buried in a fortress, where the ghosts of a thousand murdered captives might have gathered nightly (if the dead do haunt the scenes of their despatch) to scare him from his task.

And what shall we say of that immortal epic, the Christian Odyssey, the believer's Road Book to Heaven, the Itinerary to the Celestial Land, which was composed in gaol by the great Dreamer of spiritual Dreams? Rarely has a prison been more gloriously visited or more brilliantly illuminated than the quaint old building upon Bedford Bridge. Bunyan expected to lie there until, to use his own picturesque metaphor, 'the moss grew upon his eye-brows;' but we know that within those four walls there was more spiritual life and activity than within the proudest tabernacle in the land. That man must have held a levée of angels every day of his incarceration. And when the dungeon doors were opened there flamed out a light which could have been kindled at no human source, and which will continue to gladden and comfort mankind with its never-dying splendour.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE WOLF AT THE DOOR.

BUT amongst the many foes which Genius has had to encounter, one of the direst and steadiest has been poverty. It is never a pleasant thing to have a wolf howling at your door. It always makes dreary music for the dweller within. Yet that mythical animal has been particularly troublesome to poets. It seems to have a spite against the tuneful throng. When it discovers a young man with a turn for rhyme and a distaste for ordinary toil, it has a fiendish pleasure in following him up several flights of stairs to his miserable chamber, and, stationing itself at his door, keeps up a terrible cry all through the night and often right through the day. Many, indeed, have perished under its cruel fangs, whilst others have been mangled so severely during their early career that the scars have remained upon their souls to the end of life. Verily it is a right vicious beast.

Indeed, in the records of literature we find traces of men who seem to have adopted insolvency as their natural state of existence. They might have been born to bankruptcy. They came into the world without a shilling of fortune, and seem to have passed through life with a bailiff at their heels; they were always being served with writs of summons, and their goods, if they had any, laboured under periodical executions; they seemed to be quite at home in gaols or sponging-houses,