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 Stationers' Hall had assumed that Partridge was dead—a serious matter for the prospects of his Almanac—it became necessary for him to vindicate his title to being a living person. Whether the next tract, Squire Bickerstaff Detected, was, as Scott asserts, the result of an appeal to Rowe or Yalden by Partridge, and they, under the pretence of assisting him, treacherously making a fool of him, or an independent j'eu d'esprit, is not quite clear. Nor is it easy to settle with any certainty the authorship. In the Dublin edition of Swift's works, it is attributed to Nicholas Rowe; Scott assigns it to Thomas Yalden, the preacher of Bridewell and a well-known poet. Congreve is also said to have had a hand in it. It would have been well for Partridge had he allowed matters to rest here, but unhappily he inserted in the November issue of his Almanac another solemn assurance to the public that he was still alive; and was fool enough to add, that he was not only alive at the time he was writing, but was also alive on the day on which Bickerstaff had asserted that he was dead. Swift saw his opportunity, and in the most amusing of this series of tracts proceeded to prove that Partridge, under whatever delusions as to his continued existence he might be labouring, was most certainly dead and buried.
The tracts here printed by no means exhaust the literature of the Partridge hoax, but nothing else which appeared is worth reviving. It is surprising that Scott should include in Swift's works a vapid and pointless contribution attributed to a 'Person of Quality.' The effect of all this on poor Partridge was most disastrous; for three years his Almanac was discontinued. When it was revived, in 1714, he had discovered that his enemy was Swift. What comments he made will be found at the end of these tracts. Partridge did not long survive the resuscitation of his Almanac. What had been fiction became fact on June 24th, 1715, and his virtues and accomplishments, delineated by a hand more friendly than Swift's, were long decipherable, in most respectable Latin, on his tomb in Mortlake Churchyard.
The Partridge hoax has left a permanent trace in our classical literature. When, in the spring of 1709, Steele was about to start the Tatler, he thought he could best secure the ear of the public by adopting the name with which Englishmen were then as familiar as a century and a half afterwards they became with the name of Pickwick. It was under the title of the Lucubrations of Isaac Bickerstaff that the essays which initiated the most attractive and popular form of our periodical literature appeared.
The next tract, Gay's Present State of Wit, takes up the history of our popular literature during the period which immediately succeeded the discomfiture of poor Partridge. Its author, John Gay, who is, as we need scarcely add, one of the most eminent of the minor poets of the Augustan age, was at the time of its appearance almost entirely unknown. Born in September 1685, at Barnstaple, of a respectable but decayed family, he had received a good education at the free grammar school of that place. On leaving school he had been apprenticed to a silk mercer in London. But he had polite tastes, and employed his leisure time in scribbling verses and in frequenting with his friend, Aaron Hill, the literary coffee-houses. In 1708 he published a vapid and stupid parody, suggested by John Philip's Splendid Shilling and Cider, entitled Wine. His next performance was the tract which is here printed, and which is dated May 3rd, 1711. It is written with skill and sprightliness, and certainly shows a very exact and extensive acquaintance with the journalistic world of those times. And it is this which gives it its value. The best and most useful form, perhaps, which our remarks on it can take will be to furnish it with a running commentary explaining its allusions both to publications and to persons. It begins with a reference to the unhappy plight of Dr. King. This was Dr. William King, who is not to be confounded with his contemporaries and namesakes, the Archbishop of Dublin or the Principal of St. Mary Hall, Oxford, but who may be best, perhaps, described as the Dr. William King 'who could write verses in a tavern three hours after he could not speak.' He had long been a prominent figure among wits and humorists. His most important recent performances had been his Art of Cookery and his Art of Love, published respectively in 1708 and in 1709. In the latter year he had, much to the disgust of Sir John Soames, issued some very amusing parodies of the Philosophical Transactions, which he entitled Useful Transactions in Philosophy and other sorts of Learning, to be continued as long as it could find buyers. It ceased apparently to find buyers, and after reaching three numbers had collapsed. When the Examiner was started in August 1710, King was one of the chief contributors. Latterly, however, things had been going very badly with this 'poor starving wit,' as Swift called him. He was either imprisoned or on the point of being imprisoned in the Fleet, but death freed him from his troubles at the end of 1712. John Ozell was, perhaps, the most ridiculous of the scribblers then before the public, maturing steadily for the Dunciad, where, many years afterwards, he found his proper place. He rarely aspired beyond 'translations,' and the Monthly Amusement referred to is not, as might be supposed, a periodical, but simply his frequent appearances as a translator. Gay next passes to periodicals and newspapers. De Foe is treated as he was always treated by the wits. Pope's lines are well known, and the only reference to him in Swift is: 'The fellow who was pilloried—I forget his name.' Posterity has done him more justice. The 'poor Review' is of course the Weekly Review, started by De Foe in 1704, the first number of which appeared on Saturday, February 19th of that year. It had been continued weekly, and still continued, till 1712, extending to nine volumes, eight of which are extant.[3] The Observator, which is also described as in its decline, had been set up by John Tutchin in imitation of the paper issued by Sir Roger L'Estrange in 1681, its first number appearing April 1st, 1702. Tutchin, dying in 1707, the paper was continued for the benefit of his widow, under the management of George Ridpath, the editor of the Flying Post, and it continued to linger on till 1712, when it was extinguished by the Stamp Tax. The first number of the Examiner appeared on the 3rd of August 1710, and it was set up by the Tories to oppose the Tatler, the chief contributors to it being Dr. King, Bolingbroke, then Henry St. John, Prior, Atterbury, and Dr. Freind. With No. 14 (Thursday, October 26th, 1710), Swift assumed the management, and writing thirty-two papers successively, made it the most influential political journal in the kingdom. The 'Letter to Crassus' appeared on February 1st, 1711, and was written by Swift. To oppose the Examiner, the Whigs set up what, after the second number, they called the Whig Examiner, the first number of which appeared on September 14th, 1710. It was continued weekly till October 12th, five numbers appearing, all of which were, with one exception, perhaps, written by Addison, so that Gay's conjecture—if Bickerstaff may be extended to include Addison—was correct. The Medley, to which Gay next passes, was another Whig organ. The first number appeared on August 5th, 1710, and it was continued weekly till August 6th, 1711. It was conducted by Arthur Mainwaring, a man of family and fortune, and an ardent Whig, with the assistance of Steele, Anthony Henley, and Oldmixon.
With the reference to the Tatler, we pass from obscurity into daylight. Since April 12th, 1709, that delightful periodical had regularly appeared three times a week. With the two hundredth and seventy-first number on January 2nd, 1711, it suddenly ceased. Of the great surprise and disappointment caused by its cessation, of the causes assigned for it, and of the high appreciation of all it had effected for moral and intellectual improvement and pleasure, Gay gives a vivid picture. What he says conjecturally about the reasons for its discontinuance is so near the truth that we may suspect he had had some light on the subject from Steele himself. It was, of course, from the preface to the edition of the first three volumes of the collected Tatlers, published in 1710, that Gay derived what he says about the contributions of Addison (though Steele had not mentioned him by name, in accordance, no doubt, with Addison's request) and about the verses of Swift. In all probability this was the first public association of Addison's name with the Tatler. The Mr. Henley referred to was Anthony Henley, a man of family and fortune, and one of the most distinguished of the wits of that age, to whom Garth dedicated The Dispensary. In politics he was a rabid Whig, and it was he who described Swift as 'a beast for ever after the order of Melchisedec.' Gay had not been misinformed, for Henley was the author of the first letter in No. 26 and of the letter in No. 193, under the character of Downes.
The cessation of the Tatler had been the signal for the appearance of several spurious papers purporting to be new numbers. One entitling itself No. 272 was published by one John Baker; another, purporting to be No. 273, was by 'Isaac Bickerstaff, Junior.' Then, on January 6th, appeared what purported to be Nos. 272 and 273 of the original issue, with a letter from Charles Lillie, one of the publishers of the original Tatler. Later in January, William Harrison, a protégé of Swift, a young man whose name will be familiar to all who are acquainted with Swift's Journal to Stella, was encouraged by Swift to start a new Tatler, Swift liberally assisting him with notes, and not only contributing himself but inducing Congreve also to contribute a paper. And this new Tatler actually ran to fifty-two numbers, appearing twice a week between January 13th and May 19th, 1711, but, feeble from the first, it then collapsed. Nor had the Tatler been without rivals. In the two hundred and twenty-ninth number of the Tatler, Addison, enumerating his antagonists, says, 'I was threatened to be answered weekly Tit for Tat, I was undermined by the Whisperer, scolded at by a Female Tatler, and slandered by another of the same character under the title of Atalantis.' To confine ourselves, however, to the publications mentioned by Gay. The Growler appeared on the 27th of January 1711, on the discontinuance of the Tatler. The Whisperer was first published on October 11th, 1709, under the character of 'Mrs. Jenny Distaff, half-sister to Isaac Bickerstaff.' The Tell Tale appears to be a facetious title for the Female Tatler, the first number of which appeared on July 8th, 1709, and was continued for a hundred and eleven numbers, under the editorship of Thomas Baker, till March 3rd, 1710. The allusion in the postscript to the British Apollo is to a paper entitled The British Apollo: or Curious Amusements for the Ingenious, the first number of which appeared on Friday, March 13th, 1708, the paper regularly continuing on Wednesdays and Fridays till March 16th, 1711. Selections from this curious miscellany were afterwards printed in three volumes, and ran into three editions. Gay does not appear to be aware that this periodical had ceased. The reference in 'the two statesmen of the last reign whose characters are well expressed in their mottoes' are to Lord Somers and the Earl of Halifax, as what follows refers respectively to Addison and Steele. The tract closes with a reference to the Spectator, the first number of which had appeared on the first of the preceding March.
Gay's brochure attracted the attention of Swift, who thus refers to it in his Journal to Stella, May 14th, 1711: 'Dr. Freind was with me and pulled out a two-penny pamphlet just published called The State of Wit. The author seems to be a Whig, yet he speaks very highly of a paper called the Examiner, and says the supposed author of it is Dr. Swift, but above all he praises the Tatler and Spectator.'