Defoe was not insensible to the value of this element to a popular journal.

He knew, he said, that people liked to be amused; and he supplied this want in a section of his paper entitled "Mercure Scandale; or, Advice from the Scandalous Club, being a weekly history of Nonsense, Impertinence, Vice, and Debauchery." Under this attractive heading, Defoe noticed current scandals, his club being represented as a tribunal before which offenders were brought, their cases heard, and sentence passed upon them.

Slanderers of the True-Born Englishman frequently figure in its proceedings.

It was in this section also that Defoe exposed the errors of contemporary news-writers, the _Post-man_, the _Post-Boy_, the _London Post_, the _Flying Post_, and the _Daily Courant_.

He could not in his prison pretend to superior information regarding the events of the day; the errors which he exposed were chiefly blunders in geography and history.