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