between Scott and Defoe cannot be pressed. What interested Defoe was the heroine, and the form of his book proceeds naturally out of her character. Seduced by a younger brother and married to an elder, she takes to husbands in the earlier and brighter part of her career: not to prostitution, which she detests with all the force of a decent and affectionate heart. She and most of the characters in Defoe’s underworld are kind to one another, they save each other’s feelings and run risks through personal loyalty. Their innate goodness is always flourishing despite the author’s better judgment, the reason evidently being that the author had some great experience himself while in Newgate. We do not know what it was, probably he himself did not know afterwards, for he was a busy slipshod journalist and a keen politician. But something occurred to him in prison, and out of its vague, powerful emotion Moll and Roxana are born. Moll is a character physically, with hard plump limbs that get into bed and pick pockets. She lays no stress upon her appearance, yet she moves us as having height and weight, as breathing and eating, and doing many of the things that are usually missed out. Husbands were her earlier employ: she was trigamous if not quadrigamous, and one of her husbands turned out to be a brother. She was happy with all of them, they were nice to her, she nice to them. Listen to the pleasant jaunt her draper husband took her—she never cared for him much.
“Come, my dear,” says he to me one day, “shall we go and take a turn into the country for about a week?” “Ay, my dear,” says I, “whither would you go?” “I care not whither,” says he, “but I have a mind to look like quality for a week. We’ll go to Oxford,” says he. “How,” says I, “shall we go? I am no horsewoman, and ’tis too far for a coach.” “Too far!” says he; “no place is too far for a coach-and-six. If I carry you out, you shall travel like a duchess.” “Hum,” says I, “my dear, ’tis a frolic; but if you have a mind to it, I don’t care.” Well, the time was appointed,