The Life and surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe is one of the boots which seem to be written for all time. Like Shakespeare, Pilgrim’s Progress, and, if we may venture on the comparison, Holy Scripture, it never gets old, but is ever fresh and racy ; the style is plain and homely, but beautiful and generally clear— paragraph after paragraph occurs in which no word exceeds two syllables— and though delightful to all classes, it addresses itself especially to those with the simplest comprehension. The minuteness of detail, the leaf-painting, so to speak, with which the hero’s occupations are described, his odd reflections and quaint moralizing, but especially the characteristic energy with which he sets about repairing the several disasters he meets with ; and the simplicity, not without a little unconscious bravado, with which he shoulders his two guns and girds on his old ship’s cutlass ; and the ingenuity, not unmixed with simplicity, with which he sets about the construction of his boat, and afterwards of his battery of old ship’s muskets, when he discovers the visits of the cannibals to his island ; his attachment to his goats and his parrot, and above all to Friday, are all so many justifications of the favour he finds with seafaring men and boys, and with the illiterate classes generally.