This went on for a year before my Lord Townsend went out of the office, and His Lordship, in consideration of the service, made me the appointment which Mr. Buckley knows of, with promise of a further allowance as service presented.
My Lord Sunderland, to whose goodness I had many years ago been obliged, when I was in a secret commission sent to Scotland, was pleased to approve and continue this service, and the appointment annexed, and, with His Lordship’s approbation I introduced myself, in the disguise of a translator of the foreign news, to be so far concerned in this weekly paper of Mist’s as to be able to keep it within the circle of a secret management, also prevent the mischievous part of it, and yet neither Mist, or any of those concerned with him, have the least guess or suspicion by whose direction I do it.
There is nothing, it seems to us, for any apologist to say in explanation of this extraordinary statement. The emissary of a Whig and Hanoverian government acting as editor of a Tory and Jacobite newspaper,--nay, of three newspapers,--in order to take the harm out of them, to amuse the Tory party with a pretense of style and subjects suitable to their views, while balking all their purposes, is at once the most ingenious and the most shameless of all devices. It continued for a long period, and was very successful. But when the deceit was discovered at last, Mist, the deluded publisher, made a murderous assault upon the deceiver, and the journalists of the period seem to have risen unanimously against him. That Defoe must have fallen sadly before he came to this is very evident; but how he fell, except by the natural vengeance of deterioration, which makes a man who has long paltered with the truth unable at last to distinguish the gradations which separate the doubtful from the criminal, no one can say. He must, however, have fallen indeed in position and importance before he could be put to such miserable work; and he must have fallen more fatally, like that other son of the morning, deep down into hades, where he became the father of lies and the betrayer of mankind, before he could have been capable of this infamous mission.