Memoirs of a Cavalier A Military Journal of the Wars in Germany, and the Wars in England. From the Year 1632 to the Year 1648.

Excerpt

Daniel Defoe is, perhaps, best known to us as the author of Robinson
Crusoe, a book which has been the delight of generations of boys and
girls ever since the beginning of the eighteenth century.  For it was
then that Defoe lived and wrote, being one of the new school of prose
writers which grew up at that time and which gave England new forms
of literature almost unknown to an earlier age.  Defoe was a vigorous
pamphleteer, writing first on the Whig side and later for the Tories
in the reigns of William III and Anne.  He did much to foster the
growth of the newspaper, a form of literature which henceforth became
popular.  He also did much towards the development of the modern novel,
though he did not write novels in our sense of the word.  His books
were more simple than is the modern novel.  What he really wrote were
long stories told, as is Robinson Crusoe, in the first person and
with so much detail that it is hard to believe that they are works of
imagination and not true stories.  “The little art he is truly master
of, is of forging a story and imposing it upon the world as truth.”  So
wrote one of his contemporaries.  Charles Lamb, in criticizing Defoe,
notices this minuteness of detail and remarks that he is, therefore,
an author suited only for “servants” (meaning that this method can
appeal only to comparatively uneducated minds).  Really as every boy
and girl knows, a good story ought to have this quality of seeming
true, and the fact that Defoe can so deceive us makes his work the
more excellent reading.