Daniel Defoe 
History of a Plague in London [EPUB ebook] 

The Introduction begins: ‘The father of Daniel Defoe was a butcher in the paris h of St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, London. In this parish, probably, Daniel Defoe was born in 1661, the year after the restoration of Charles II. The boy’s parents wished him to become a dissenting minister, and so intrusted his education to a Mr. Morton who kept an academy for the training of nonconformist divines. How long Defoe staid at this school is not known. He seems to think himself that he staid there long enough to become a good scholar; for he declares that the pupils were ‘made masters of the English tongue, and more of them excelled in that particular than of any school at that time.’ If this statement be true, we can only say that the other schools must have been very bad indeed. Defoe never acquired a really good style, and can in no true sense be called a ‘master of the
English tongue.’