It is incredible, if their account is to be depended upon, what a prodigious number of those creatures were destroyed. I think they talked of forty thousand dogs and five times as many cats; few houses being without a cat, some having several, sometimes five or six in a house.
Some Endeavors were used to suppress the Printing of such Books as terrify’d the People, and to frighten the dispersers of them, some of whom were taken up, but nothing was done in it, as I am inform’d; The Government being unwilling to exasperate the People, who were, as I may say, all out of their Wits already.
So sehen wir nie die wahren Vorteile unseres Zustandes, ehe wir die entgegenstehende Nachteile erfahren haben; wir lernen den Wert der Dinge erst dann kennen, wenn wir sie verloren haben!
Men did then no more die by tale and by number. They might put out a weekly bill, and call them seven or eight thousand, or what they pleased; ’tis certain they died by heaps, and were buried by heaps, that is to say, without account.
I have saved your life on no other terms than I would be glad to be saved myself: and it may, one time or other, be my lot to be taken up in the same condition. Besides,” said he, “when I carry you to the Brazils, so great a way from your own country, if I should take from you what you have, you will be starved there, and then I only take away that life I have given.
To conclude: having staid near four mouths in Hamburgh, I came from thence over land to the Hague, where I embarked in the packet, and arrived in London the tenth of January 1705, having been gone from England ten years and nine months.
How frequently in the Course of our Lives, the Evil which in it self we seek most to shun, and which when we are fallen into it, is the most dreadful to us, is oftentimes the very Means or Door of our Deliverance, by.
The face of London was now indeed strangely altered:.
Under these dreadful apprehensions I looked back on the life I had led with the utmost contempt and abhorrence. I blushed, and wondered at myself how I could act thus, how I could divest myself of modesty and honour, and prostitute myself for gain; and I thought, if ever it should please God to spare me this one time from death, it would not.
It was now that I began sensibly to feel how much more happy this life I now led was, with all its miserable circumstances, than the wicked, cursed, abominable life I led all the past part of my days; and now I changed both my sorrows and my joys; my very desires altered, my affections changed their gusts, and my delights were perfectly new from what they were at my first coming, or, indeed, for the two years past.
And thus I left the island, the 19th of December, as I found by the ship’s account, in the year 1686, after I had been upon it eight-and-twenty years, two months, and nineteen days;.
Another plague year would reconcile all these differences; a close conversing with death, or with diseases that threaten death, would scum off the gall from our tempers, remove the animosities among us, and bring us to see with differing eyes than those which we looked on things with before.
Though this was all but a fiction of his own, yet it had its desired effect; Atkins fell upon his knees to beg the captain to intercede with the governor for his life; and all the rest begged of him, for God’s sake, that they might not be sent to England.
Thus I liv’d mighty comfortably, my Mind being entirely composed by resigning to the Will of God, and throwing my self wholly upon the Disposal of his Providence. This made my Life better than sociable, for when I began to regret the want of Conversation, I would ask my self whether thus conversing mutually with my own Thoughts, and, as I hope I may say, with even God himself by Ejaculations, was not better than the utmost Enjoyment of humane Society in the World.
I had more wealth, indeed, than I had before, but was not at all the richer; for I had no more use for it than the Indians of Peru had before the Spaniards came there.
In 1719 – at the age of 59 – Defoe turned his attention for the first time to an extended work of prose fiction, presenting his account of events of which he had no direct experience. Robinson Crusoe, the account of the shipwreck and survival of one man, became a great success, and Defoe turned his full attention to his lucrative writing career.
This is written in miserable doggerel verse. That Defoe should have mistaken it for poetry, and should have prided himself upon it accordingly, is only a proof of how incompetent an author is to pass judgment upon what is good and what is bad in his own work.
If I swing by the string, I shall hear the bell ring, And then there’s an end of poor Jenny.
We drank the rum, and I forgot my promise to God.
I then reflected, that as God, who was not only righteous but omnipotent, had thought fit thus to punish and afflict me, so He was able to deliver me: that if He did not think fit to do so, it was my unquestioned duty to resign myself absolutely and entirely to His will; and, on the other hand, it was my duty also to hope in Him, pray to Him, and quietly to attend to the dictates and directions of His daily providence.