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