He was engaged henceforward in serving two masters, persuading each that he served him alone, and persuading the public, in spite of numberless insinuations, that he served nobody but them and himself, and wrote simply as a free lance under the jealous sufferance of the Government of the day.
I must reserve for a separate chapter some account of Defoe's greatest political work, which he began while he still lay in Newgate, the _Review_.

Another work which he wrote and published at the same period deserves attention on different grounds.

His history of the great storm of November, 1703, _A Collection of the most remarkable Casualties and Disasters which happened in the late Dreadfal Tempest, both by Sea and Land_, may be set down as the first of his works of invention.

It is a most minute and circumstantial record, containing many letters from eye-witnesses of what happened in their immediate neighbourhood.

Defoe could have seen little of the storm himself from the interior of Newgate, but it is possible that the letters are genuine, and that he compiled other details from published accounts.