The life and adventures of Robinson Crusoe (Volume 1)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: in London, for his father was James Foe, a butcher, of the parish of St. Giles, Cripple- gate. His family were protestant dissenters, and he, through life adhered to the same persuasion. " A dissenter," he himself says, " I am, but no independent fifth-monarchy man or leveller." His father seems to have early discovered the superiority of young Daniel's talents, for he placed him under the care of Mr. Charles Morton, of Newington Green, a distinguished teacher among the dissenters, in whose house he remained for several years, at an expense much beyond what fathers in that humble walk of life were then in the custom of bestowing on the education of their children. In 1705 he was reproached with want of letters by his adversary Tutchin, and thus replied: " I owe this justice to my ancient father, who is yet living, and in whose behalf I freely testify, that if I am a blockhead, it is nobody's fault but my own; he having spared nothing that might qualify me to match the accurate Dr. Bently, or the most learned Tutchin." For what particular line of life the butcher intended to rear his promising son, there is no ground to conjecture; he himself asserts, that he never served any apprenticeship; butit is probable, trade in some shape was his destination. He was admitted a liveryman of London, in right of his birth, on the 26th of January 1687-8, and appeared, if we may believe Oldmixon, on horseback, and in gallant attire, among a chosen band of citizens, who escorted King William from Whitehall to the Mansion-house, when the monarch was feasted by the Lord Mayor, on the 29th of October in the succeeding year. Even before this period, however, Daniel had distinguished himself in more ways than one ; he wrote a pamphlet in 1683, to show the absurdity of leaving the Austrians to be co...