He was fifty-eight at the time this book was written--a man worn with endless work and strife, but ever ready for more--a man who had fallen and failed, and made but little of his life. It is said that he was at his highest point of external prosperity when he published “Robinson Crusoe”; but when we remember that he was at that time engaged in the inconceivable muddle of “Mist’s Journal,” it seems almost impossible to believe this, or to understand how anything but poverty could drive him into such a disgraceful employment. No doubt, to a man who at heart had once been an honest man, and was so no more, it must have been a relief and blessed deliverance to escape away into the distant seas, to refresh his ever-active soul with the ingenious devices of the shipwrecked sailor, and bury himself in that life so different from his own, the savage necessities, the primitive cares. The goats and the parrot and poor Friday: what an ease and comfort to escape into their society after bamboozling Mist, and reporting to my lord at St. James’s! Was it a desperate expedient of nature to save him from utter self-contempt? Such a man, even if his conscience had grown callous, must have required some outlet from the dreadful slavery to which he had bound himself.