Defoe's individuality is so marked that it thrusts itself through every disguise.

A careful student of the _Review_, who had compared it with the literature of the time, and learnt his peculiar tricks of style and vivid ranges of interest, could not easily be at fault in identifying a composition of any length.
Defoe's incomparable clearness of statement would alone betray him; that was a gift of nature which no art could successfully imitate.
Contemporaries also were quick at recognising their Proteus in his many shapes, and their gossip gives a strong support to internal evidence, resting as it probably did on evidences which were not altogether internal.

Though Mr.Lee may have been rash sometimes in quoting little scraps of news as Defoe's, he must be admitted to have established that, prodigious as was the number and extent of the veteran's separate publications during the reign of the First George, it was also the most active period of his career as a journalist.

Managing Mist and writing for his journal would have been work enough for an ordinary man; but Defoe founded, conducted, and wrote for a host of other newspapers--the monthly _Mercurius Politicus_, an octavo of sixty-four pages (1716-1720); the weekly _Dormer's News-Letter_ (written, not printed, 1716-1718); the _Whitehall Evening Post_ (a tri-weekly quarto-sheet, established 1718); the _Daily Post_ (a daily single leaf, folio, established 1719); and _Applebee's Journal_ (with which his connexion began in 1720 and ended in 1726).
The contributions to these newspapers which Mr.Lee has assigned, with great judgment it seems to me, to Defoe, range over a wide field of topics, from piracy and highway robberies to suicide and the Divinity of Christ.

Defoe's own test of a good writer was that he should at once please and serve his readers, and he kept this double object in view in his newspaper writings, as much as in _Robinson Crusoe_, _Moll Flanders_, and the _Family Instructor_.