But if Defoe had never written a line of "Robinson Crusoe," we should know him to be a great genius and a fine artist by the opening pages of "Colonel Jack." All about the lives of the three boys, their sleeping in glass houses, their picking of pockets, the loss of the money in the hollow tree, and then the recovery of it, is in its kind matchless in fiction. Wonderfully fine too are many of the touches in "Moll Flanders": the whole story of her descent from the honesty of a simple serving-maid to the horrors of Newgate and transportation, is so masterful, the art is so consummate, the impersonation by Defoe of the character of a subtle trollop full of roguish moralizings and thin sentimentalities, is so extraordinary, that one can never cease to deplore that, not the subject of the book, but Defoe's indecent handling of it, should compel the world virtually to taboo it. "Roxana" is also on the condemned list for the same reason. But literature could sooner spare this book than the other two. It was completed by another hand, and Defoe's own share might have very well been the work of the person who wrote the sequel.
Another masterpiece is his "History of the Plague." This shows his imagination at its highest, and it is not impossible but that its composition may have cost him more trouble than "Robinson Crusoe" itself. There is no space left to deal with his other works. Reference can only be made to "Captain Singleton," "A System of Magic," "A History of the Devil," "The Family Instructor," "The Plan of English Commerce," "A New Voyage Round the World," etc. In naming these I abbreviate the titles. Most of Defoe's title-pages epitomize his works, and merely as a list would fill a stout volume.
It has been suggested that Defoe in his old age became insane, and hid himself from his family for no discoverable reasons. It is certain that in September, 1729, he mysteriously removed from his house, and went into hiding in the neighborhood of Greenwich. From his secret retreat he addressed letters to his son-in-law Baker, complaining of his having been inhumanly ill-used by someone whom Mr. Lee, one of his biographers, conjectures was Mist, the proprietor of _Mist's Journal_, with whom Defoe had been associated in business. Other biographers seem to think that Defoe was merely hiding from the pursuit of his creditors, and dodging in his old dexterous manner the obligation of making over property to his daughter Hannah, who was married to Baker. For two years he was homeless and fugitive; it is not asserted, however, that he was in actual distress at the time of his death. He died in a lodging in a then respectable neighborhood called Ropemaker's Alley, Moor Fields, April 26, 1731, in his seventieth year.