He has also an amazingly exact acquaintance with the technicalities of all kinds of trades and professions; none of our writers, not even Shakespeare, shows half such a knowledge of the circumstances of life among different ranks and conditions of men; none of them has realized with such fidelity how so many different persons lived and moved.

His gift of narrative and description is masterly, as readers of his novels know (we shall have to come back to it in discussing the growth of the English novel); several of his works show him to have been endowed with a fine faculty of psychological observation.

Without the least consciousness of the value of what he was writing, nor indeed with any deliberate artistic intention, he made himself one of the masters of English prose.
Defoe had been the champion of the Whigs; on the Tory side the ablest pen was that of Jonathan Swift.

His works proclaim him to have had an intellect less wide in its range than that of his antagonist but more vigorous and powerful.

He wrote, too, more carefully.