An English Garner | Page 9

he last saw Milton

we have no means of knowing. He never refers to him again. His
autobiography closes with the year 1683.
For the rest of his life Ellwood was engaged for the most part in
fighting the battles of the Quakers-esoterically in endeavouring to
compose their internal feuds, exoterically in defending them and their
tenets against their common enemies--and in writing poetry, which it is
to be hoped he did not communicate to his 'master.' After the death of
his father in 1684 he lived in retirement at Amersham. His most
important literary service was his edition of George Fox's Journal, the
manuscript of which he transcribed and published. He died at his house
on Hunger Hill, Amersham, in March 1714, and lies with Penn in the
Quaker's burying-ground at New Jordan, Chalfont St. Giles.
We have now arrived at the pamphlets in our Miscellany bearing on the
reign of Queen Anne. First come the Partridge tracts. The history of the
inimitable hoax of which they are the record is full of interest. In
November 1707 Swift, then Vicar of Laracor, came over to England on
a commission from Archbishop King. His two satires, the Battle of the
Books and the Tale of a Tub, published anonymously three years before,
had given him a foremost place among the wits, for their authorship
was an open secret. Though he was at this time principally engaged in
the cause of the Established Church, in active opposition to what he
considered the lax latitudinarianism of the Whigs on the one hand and
the attacks of the Freethinkers on the other, he found leisure for doing
society another service. Nothing was more detestable to Swift than
charlatanry and imposture. From time immemorial the commonest
form which quackery has assumed has been associated with astrology
and prophecy. It was the frequent theme or satire in the New Comedy
of the Greeks and in the Comedy of Rome; it has fallen under the lash
of Horace and Juvenal; nowhere is Lucian more amusing than when
dealing with this species of roguery. Chaucer with exquisite humour
exposed it and its kindred alchemy in the fourteenth century, and Ben
Jonson and the author of Albumazar in the seventeenth. Nothing in
Hudibras is more rich in wit and humour than the exposure of
Sidrophel, and one of the best of Dryden's comedies is the Mock
Astrologer. But it was reserved for Swift to produce the most amusing
satire which has ever gibbeted these mischievous mountebanks.
John Partridge, whose real name is said to have been Hewson, was born

on the 18th of January 1644. He began life, it appears, as a shoemaker;
but being a youth of some abilities and ambition, had acquired a fair
knowledge of Latin and a smattering of Greek and Hebrew. He had
then betaken himself to the study of astrology and of the occult
sciences. After publishing the _Nativity of Lewis XIV._ and an
astrological essay entitled Prodromus, he set up in 1680 a regular
prophetic almanac, under the title of Merlinus Liberatus. A Protestant
alarmist, for such he affected to be, was not likely to find favour under
the government of James II., and Partridge accordingly made his way to
Holland. On his return he resumed his Almanac, the character of which
is exactly described in the introduction to the Predictions, and it
appears to have had a wide sale. Partridge, however, was not the only
impostor of his kind, but had, as we gather from notices in his Almanac
and from his other pamphlets, many rivals. He was accordingly obliged
to resort to every method of bringing himself and his Almanac into
prominence, which he did by extensive and impudent advertisements in
the newspapers and elsewhere. In his Almanac for 1707 he issues a
notice warning the public against impostors usurping his name. It was
this which probably attracted Swift's attention and suggested his
mischievous hoax.
The pamphlets tell their own tale, and it is not necessary to tell it here.
The name, Isaac Bickerstaff, which has in sound the curious propriety
so characteristic of Dickens's names, was, like so many of the names in
Dickens, suggested by a name on a sign-board, the name of a locksmith
in Long Acre. The second tract, purporting to be written by a revenue
officer, and giving an account of Partridge's death, was, of course, from
the pen of Swift. The verses on Partridge's death appeared
anonymously on a separate sheet as a broadside. It is amusing to learn
that the tract announcing Partridge's death, and the approaching death
of the Duke of Noailles, was taken quite seriously, for Partridge's name
was struck off the rolls of Stationers' Hall, and the Inquisition in
Portugal ordered the tract containing the treasonable prediction to be
burned. As