Note 77 — THE LIFE OF DE FOE, BY GEORGE CHALMERS, ESQ.

The most solemn asseverations, and the most unanswerable arguments of our author, were not, after all, believed. When Charles King republished The British Merchant, in 1721, he without a scruple attributed The Mercator to a hireling writer of a weekly paper called the Review. And Anderson, at a still later period, goes further in his Chronology of Commerce, and names De Foe, as the hireling writer of the Mercator, and other papers in favour of the French treaty of trade. We can now judge with the impartiality of arbitrators: on the one hand, there are the living challenge, and the death-bed declaration of De Foe; on the other, the mere surmise and unauthorised assertion of King, Anderson, and others, who detract from their own veracity by their own factiousness, or foolery. It is surely time to free ourselves from prejudices of every kind, and to disregard the sound of names as much as the falsehoods of party.