But it is far from elaborate in any other way and has hardly the least decoration or poetical quality.

Well as we know Crusoe's Island the actual scenery of it is not half so much impressed as that even, for instance, of Masterman Ready's--it is either of the human figures--Crusoe's own grotesque bedizenment, the savages, Friday, the Spaniards, Will Atkins--or of the works of man--the stockade, the boat, and the rest--that we think.

A little play is made with Jack's glass-house squalor and Roxana's magnificence _de mauvais lieu_, but not much: the gold-dust and deserts of _Singleton_ are a necessary part of the "business," but nothing more.

_Moll Flanders_--in some respects the greatest of all his books--has the bareness of an Elizabethan stage in scenery and properties--it is much if Greenfield spares us a table or a bed to furnish it.
Of Dialogue Defoe is specially fond--even making his personages soliloquise in this after a fashion--and it plays a very important part in "the secret:" yet it can hardly be classed very high _as_ dialogue.
And this is at least partly due to the strange _drab_ shapelessness of his style, which never takes on any brilliant colour, or quaint individual form.
Yet it is very questionable whether any other style would have suited the method so well, or would even have suited it at all.

For this method--to leave off hinting at it and playing round it--is one of almost endless accumulation of individually trivial incident, detail, and sometimes observation, the combined effect of which is to produce an insensible but undoubting acceptance, on the reader's part, of the facts presented to him.