_Robert Drury_ (Vol. v., p. 533.).--I am afraid that the credit attachable
to Drury's _Madagascar_ is not supported or strengthened by the
announcement that the author was "every day to be spoken with" at Old Tom's
Coffee House in Birchin Lane. _The Apparition of Mrs. Veal_, and other
productions of a similar description, should make us very doubtful as
regards the literature of the earlier part of the eighteenth century. Might
not a person have been suborned to represent the fictitious Robert Drury,
to the benefit of the coffee-house keeper as well as the publisher? I am
induced to express this suspicion by a parallel case of the same period.
_The Ten Years' Voyages of Captain George Roberts_, London, 1726, is
universally, I {486} believe, considered fictitious, and ascribed to Defoe;
yet at the end of the work we find:
"N. B.--The little boy so often mentioned in the foregoing sheets, now
lives with Mr. Galapin, a tobacconist, in Monument Yard; and may be
referred to for the truth of most of the particulars before related."