when you should have been in your coffin this three hours? In short, what
with undertakers, imbalmers, joiners, sextons, and your damn’d elegy hawk-
ers, upon a late practitioner in physick and astrology, I got not one wink
of sleep that night, nor scarce a moment’s rest ever since. Now I doubt not
but this villainous ‘squire has the impudence to assert, that these are en-
tirely strangers to him; he, good man, knows nothing of the matter, and
honest I
saac Bickerstaff, I warrant you, is more a man of honour, than to be
an accomplice with a pack of rascals, that walk the streets on nights, and
disturb good people in their beds; but he is out, if he thinks the whole world
is blind; for there is one John Partridge can smell a knave as far as Grubstreet,
– tho’ he lies in the most exalted garret, and writes himself ‘Squire: – But
I’ll keep my temper, and proceed in the narration.
I could not stir out of doors for the space of three months after this, but
presently one comes up to me in the street; Mr Partridge, that coffin you
was last buried in I have not been yet paid for: Doctor, cries another dog,
How d’ye think people can live by making of graves for nothing? Next
time you die, you may e’en toll out the bell yourself for Ned. A third
rogue tips me by the elbow, and wonders how I have the conscience to
sneak abroad without paying my funeral expences. Lord, says one, I durst
have swore that was honest Dr. Partridge, my old friend; but poor man,
he is gone. I beg your pardon, says another, you look so like my old ac-
quaintance that I used to consult on some private occasions; but, alack,
he’s gone the way of all flesh – Look, look, look, cries a third, after a
competent space of staring at me, would not one think our neighbour the
almanack-maker, was crept out of his grave to take t’other peep at the stars
in this world, and shew how much he is improv’d in fortune-telling by
having taken a journey to the other?
Nay, the very reader, of our parish, a good sober, discreet person, has
sent two or three times for me to come and be buried decently, or send
him sufficient reasons to the contrary, if I have been interr’d in any other
parish, to produce my certificate, as the act requires. My poor wife is
almost run distracted with being called Widow Partridge, when she knows
its false; and once a term she is cited into the court, to take out letters of
administration. But the greatest grievance is, a paultry quack, that takes
up my calling just under my nose, and in his printed directions with N.B.
says, He lives in the house of the late ingenious Mr. John Partridge, an
eminent practitioner in leather, physick and astrology.
But to show how far the wicked spirit of envy, malice and resentment
can hurry some men, my nameless old persecutor had provided me a
monument at the stone-cutter’s and would have erected it in the parish-church; and this piece of notorious and expensive villany had actually
succeeded, had I not used my utmost interest with the vestry, where it was
carried at last but by two voices, that I am still alive. That stratagem fail-
ing, out comes a long sable elegy, bedeck’d with hour-glasses, mattocks,
sculls, spades, and skeletons, with an epitaph as confidently written to
abuse me, and my profession, as if I had been under ground these twenty
years
I shall demonstrate to the judicious, that France and Rome are at the bottom of this horrid conspiracy against me; and that culprit aforesaid is
a popish emissary, has paid his visits to St. Germains, and is now in the measures of Lewis XIV. That in attempting my reputation, there is a general massacre of learning designed in these realms; and through my sides
there is a wound given to all the Protestant almanack-makers in the universe.
Vivat Regina.
