If we take this literally, we must suppose that his claim to have been an author eighteen years before had its origin in his fitful vanity.

The literary merits of the satire, when we compare it with the powerful verse of Dryden's _Absalom and Achitophel_, to which he refers in the exordium, are not great.
Defoe prided himself upon his verse, and in a catalogue of the Poets in one of his later pieces assigned himself the special province of "lampoon." He possibly believed that his clever doggerel was a better title to immortality than _Robinson Crusoe_.

The immediate popular effect of his satires gave some encouragement to this belief, but they are comparatively dull reading for posterity.

The clever hits at living City functionaries, indicated by their initials and nicknames, the rough ridicule and the biting innuendo, were telling in their day, but the lampoons have perished with their objects.

The local celebrity of Sir Ralph and Sir Peter, Silly Will and Captain Tom the Tailor, has vanished, and Defoe's hurried and formless lines, incisive as their vivid force must have been, are not redeemed from dulness for modern readers by the few bright epigrams with which they are besprinkled..