He has also an amazingly exact acquaintance with the technicalities
of all kinds of trades and professions; none of our writers, not even
Shakespeare, shows half such a knowledge of the circumstances of life
among different ranks and conditions of men; none of them has realized
with such fidelity how so many different persons lived and moved. His
gift of narrative and description is masterly, as readers of his novels
know (we shall have to come back to it in discussing the growth of the
English novel); several of his works show him to have been endowed with
a fine faculty of psychological observation. Without the least
consciousness of the value of what he was writing, nor indeed with any
deliberate artistic intention, he made himself one of the masters of
English prose.
Defoe had been the champion of the Whigs; on the Tory side the ablest
pen was that of Jonathan Swift. His works proclaim him to have had an
intellect less wide in its range than that of his antagonist but more
vigorous and powerful. He wrote, too, more carefully. In his youth he
had been private secretary to Sir William Temple, a writer now as good
as forgotten because of the triviality of his matter, but in his day
esteemed because of the easy urbanity and polish of his prose.
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