Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 25, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 March 1877 — One of Dean Swift’s Practical Jokes. [ARTICLE]

One of Dean Swift’s Practical Jokes.

Among the literary practical jokes Swift sometimes played was a book of prophecies he published in ridicule of a yearly almanac of predictions by one Partridge. The chief event foretold was the astrologer’s own death on the 29th of March, 1708. As soon as the date was fiast, an elaborate account of Partridge’s ast moments and sayings came out in a “ letter to a person ot honor.” Partridge found it hard to persuade people of his continued existence, and, having once complained to a Dr. Yalden, was repaid by the latter by an additional account of his sufferings and end by his supposed at Cendant physician. The poor man, was driven frantic; he says the undertaker and sexton came to him “on business;” people taunted htm on the streets with not having paid his funeral expenses; his wife was distracted by being persistently addressed as Widow Partridge, and was “cited once a term into court to take out letters of administration;" while “the very reader of our parish, a good, sober, discreet person, has two or three times sent for me to come and be buried decently, ot, if I have been interred in any other parish, to produce my certificate, as the act requires.” Sir Walter Scott remarks, as an odd coincidence, that in 1709 the Company of Stationers obtained an injunction against an almanac published under the name of John Partridge, as if the poor man had been dead in sad earpest.