[Illustration: CHURCH OF ST. GILES, CRIPPLEGATE,
WHERE DEFOE IS SUPPOSED TO HAVE BEEN BAPTIZED.
DRAWN BY HARRY FENN. ENGRAVED BY H. E. SYLVESTER.]
warmth that appeared in the clergy, and openly professed that such a man as Sacheverell and his brethren would blow up the foundations of the church”; the dissenters who were at once insulted and alarmed by the extraordinary threats thus set forth against them--all alike turned upon the perpetrator of the hoax when he was discovered. Some “blushed when they reflected how far they had applauded,” some labored to prove that it was “a horrible slander against the church.” The government, sharing the general commotion, placed Defoe in the position of a revolutionary leader who, “by the villainous insinuations of that pamphlet, would have frightened the dissenters into another rebellion.” Defoe himself seems to have had a moment of panic, and fled. He was proclaimed in the “Gazette,” and a reward offered for his discovery. His biographers in general assert that he gave himself up with some generosity to save the printer and publisher, who had been arrested, but there are public documents which seem to prove a different procedure, showing how “My Lord Nottingham hunted him out,” and how “the person who discovered Daniel Foe” claimed and was paid the reward of fifty pounds offered for the offender, described as a “middle-aged, spare man, about forty years old, of a brown complexion and dark brown colored hair (but wears a wig), a hooked nose, a sharp chin, gray eyes, and a large mole near his mouth.” However that might be, he was arrested and committed to Newgate in the spring of 1703, and the obnoxious publication--“this little book, a contemptible pamphlet of but three sheets of paper,” as he describes it--was burned by the common hangman. It was not, however, till the summer, three or four months after his arrest, that he was tried, and that period he seems to have spent in Newgate in perfect freedom, at least for literary productions, since he filled the air with a mist of pamphlets explaining that he meant nothing but a harmless satire at one moment, at another exhorting the dissenters to be content with spiritual freedom, and again bursting into the rude but potent strains of the “Hymn to the Pillory.” He was sentenced to fine and imprisonment, as well as to that grotesque but sometimes terrible instrument of torture; but the pillory was no torture to Defoe. On the last three days of July--once before the Royal Exchange in Cornhill, where his shop had been, and where no doubt everybody knew him, once in Cheapside, and again at Temple Bar--he stood aloft with the crowd surging round and performed his penance. The crowd in those days was not a soft or civil one when it indorsed the sentence pronounced by law. Its howls and cries, its missiles and its curses, made the punishment horrible. But the crowd had by this time found time to take in the joke,--banter, when it is broad enough to be intelligible, always pleases the general,--and there must have been some bonhomie about the sufferer, some good repute as a merry fellow and one who loved a jest, which conciliated the populace. Instead of dead cats, they flung him nosegays; they gathered about his platform under the low deep arch which once made a mock gate to the city, and behind the bustling ’Change, and between the shops of Cheapside, holding a series of impromptu festivals, drinking his health, shouting out his new verses, which were sold by thousands in the streets: