A Review of the State of the British Nation by Daniel Defoe (review)

105 *I am grateful to Dr. Richard Mortimer, Keeper of the Muniments at Westminster Abbey, and to the Busby Trustees, for permission to consult, transcribe, and publish these excerpts from the letters of Dr. Robert Creighton to Dr. Richard Busby. 1 See G. F. Russell Barker, Memoir of Richard Busby, with some account of Westminster School in the seventeenth century (London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1895), chs. 1–3; and for a more recent account of Busby’s curriculum, James Anderson Winn, John Dryden and His World (New Haven: Yale, 1987), pp. 36–50. 2 Busby was reinstalled as Prebendary at Wells in July 1660, having been originally appointed in July 1639 (see Barker, pp. 4, 19); he was elected proctor for the Chapter of Bath and Wells in 1661; and was made Treasurer of that Cathedral in August 1660 (see Barker, p. 19). Barker notes that Busby ‘‘was a liberal benefactor to Wells Cathedral’’ (pp. 30–31). 3 Some discussion of the intellectual interests of the Creighton (or Cryghtyn) family may be found in an article by me and Neil Hopkinson, ‘‘Johnson’s Copy of the Iliad at Felbrigg Hall, Norfolk,’’ The Book Collector, 37 (1988), 503–522. 4 A part of this letter has also been published in the Westminster School magazine, The Elizabethan, 11 (July 1904), 50. 5 See The Letters of John Dryden, ed. Charles Ward (Durham: Duke, 1952), p. 17 (also pp. 18–20), and the Poems of John Dryden, ed. James Kinsley, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958), II, 758, 771. In the headnote to the Fifth Satire, Dryden writes of ‘‘my Learned Master Busby; to whom I am not only oblig’d my self, for the best part of my Education, and that of my two Sons; but have also receiv’d from him the first and truest Taste of Persius. May he be pleas’d to find in this Translation, the Gratitude, or at least some small Acknowledgment of his unworthy Scholar, at the distance of 42 Years, from the time when I departed from under his Tuition’’ (p. 771). 6 Quoted in Winn, John Dryden and His World, p. 41. 7 Quoted in Barker, p. 28. 8 Quoted in Barker, pp. 26–27. See also a letter of November 19, 1664, by Sir William Morice to Busby, in BM Add. MSS, 28, 104, fol. 11 (see Barker, p. 26, n. 3). Bucknell University BOOK REVIEWS DANIEL DEFOE. A Review of the State of the British Nation, ed. John McVeagh. Vol 3: 1706. Part One: January–June 1706 (pp. vii–xxxii and 1–403); Part Two: July 1706–February 1707 and index (pp. 404–880). Vol. 4: 1707–1708. Part One: February –August 1707 (pp. vii–xxxii and 1–440); Part Two: September 1707–March 1708 and index (pp. 441–933). London: Pickering & Chatto, 2006. $325 each. ‘‘Nothing but Peace and Union, Rabbits and Onions; a Body would not think he should torture two poor Words at such an unmerciful Rate,’’ complained John Tutchin in the Observator, writing about the third volume (for 1706) of Defoe’s A Review of the State of the English Nation. It is true that, beginning in late September 1706, the Review makes a sudden transition from the war with France to the divisions at home, and the declaration of Queen Anne that a union between England and Scotland 106 will be achieved within her reign. Relying in part on research by Alan Downie, Mr. McVeagh shows that Defoe was responding to orders from Robert Harley in plumping for the Union, but that the policy agreed well with Defoe’s Williamite principles. The Union was good for securing Britain’s borders, good for the development of Scotland’s industrial and agricultural capacity, good for increasing English trade and shipping, good for Presbyterianism, and not good for the High Church and Jacobites. Defoe campaigned for it relentlessly, using a variety of rhetorical strategies— exposition of imports and exports, criticism of writings by such anti-Unionists as James Hodges, and pretended dialogues between a Jacobite and a Presbyterian—to find fresh ways to keep the subject before his English readers. In the end, his influence in securing the acceptance of the...