It was the story of Colonel Jacque's successful trading, no doubt, which had a large part in sustaining the popularity of his _History_. But even more important in this respect, was that which we have seen to be the vital force in all Defoe's fiction--circumstantial vividness. This is less striking in the later pages than in the earlier. The vividness ceases to a large extent after Jacque goes to America, for Defoe did not know America so well as he knew his England. Yet even when the scene shifts to the further side of the ocean, Defoe makes no blunders; nothing impossible occurs; his geography is correct. In _Colonel Jacque_, perhaps more than anywhere else, we see that interest of Defoe's in distant British possessions which made him, as I have said, one of the "imperialists" of his time. Even so, what vividness there is in the American scenes is too largely commercial. Not many people, other than small traders or would-be traders, could ever have read with interest such a paragraph as the following:--
"With the sloop I sent letters to my wife and to my chief manager with orders to load her back, as I there directed, viz., that she should have two hundred barrels of flour, fifty barrels of pease; and, to answer my other views, I ordered a hundred bales to be made up of all sorts of European goods, such as not my own warehouses only would supply, but such as they could be supplied with in other warehouses where I knew they had credit for anything."
Very different are the earlier pages which deal with Jacque's adventures as a poor criminal boy in England. Here Defoe was on ground that he knew thoroughly. Sir Leslie Stephen[1] has observed that Defoe passed beyond the bounds of probability when he made his hero, an almost elderly man writing his memoirs in Mexico, remember the details of his boyish thieving with marvellous exactness. Barring this improbability--one by the way which you are not aware of while you read the scenes in question, for you do not know how long a time will elapse before the hero begins to record his experiences--the verisimilitude of the first part of _Colonel Jacque_ could not be surpassed. Moreover, in picturing the life of the poor, neglected boy, Defoe is unusually sympathetic. And so in the early pages of _Colonel Jacque_, more than anywhere else, is found the power of the story, the secret of its popularity when Smollett was writing _Roderick Random_, and the secret of its appeal to readers to-day. Lamb was hardly overstating the case when he declared, "The beginning of 'Colonel Jack' is the most affecting, natural picture of a young thief that was ever drawn."[2]