But there are doubts and difficulties attending any explanation.
Mr.Lee has given satisfactory reasons for believing that Defoe did not, as some of his biographers have supposed, die in actual distress.
Ropemaker's Alley in Moorfields was a highly respectable street at the beginning of last century; a lodging there was far from squalid.

The probability is that Defoe subsisted on his pension from the Government during his last two years of wandering; and suffering though he was from the infirmities of age, yet wandering was less of a hardship than it would have been to other men, to one who had been a wanderer for the greater part of his life.

At the best it was a painful and dreary ending for so vigorous a life, and unless we pitilessly regard it as a retribution for his moral defects, it is some comfort to think that the old man's infirmities and anxieties were not aggravated by the pressure of hopeless and helpless poverty.

Nor do I think that he was as distressed as he represented to his son-in-law by apprehensions of ruin to his family after his death, and suspicions of the honesty of his son's intentions.

There is a half insane tone about his letter to Mr.
Baker, but a certain method may be discerned in its incoherencies.