The astrologer, forgetting to refer to the stars for evidence, indignantly declared himself to be alive, and Swift’s returning “Vindication of Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq., against what is objected to by Mr. Partridge in his Almanack for the present year, 1709, by the said Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq.,” complains: “Mr. Partridge has been lately pleased to treat me after a very rough manner in that which is called his almanack for the present year ... [regarding] my predictions, which foretold the death of Mr. Partridge to happen on March 29, 1708. This he is pleased to contradict absolutely in the almanack he has published for the present year.... “Without entering into criticisms of chronology about the hour of his death, I shall only prove that Mr. Partridge is not alive. And my first argument is this: about a thousand gentlemen having bought his almanacks for this year, merely to find what he said against me, at every line they read, they would lift up their eyes, and cry out betwixt rage and laughter, ‘they were sure no man alive ever writ such damned stuff as this.’ Neither did I ever hear that opinion disputed: ... Therefore, if an uninformed carcase walks still about and is pleased to call himself Partridge, Mr. Bickerstaff does not think himself any way answerable for that. Neither had the said carcase any right to beat the poor boy who happened to pass by it in the street, crying, ‘A full and true account of Dr. Partridge’s death,’ etc. “... I will plainly prove him to be dead, out of his own almanack for this year, and from the very passage which he produces to make us think him alive. He there says ‘he is not only now alive, but was also alive upon that very 29th of March which I foretold he should die on’: by this he declares his opinion that a man may be alive now who was not alive a twelvemonth ago. And indeed there lies the sophistry of his argument. He dares not assert he was alive ever since that 29th of March, but that he ‘is now alive and was so on that day’: I grant the latter; for he did not die till night, as appears by the printed account of his death, in a letter to a lord; and whether he be since revived, I leave the world to judge....” The joke had gained its end; the astrologer and philomath had been ridiculed out of existence. But the name of the “astrological ’squire” was in everybody’s mouth; and when in April, 1709, Steele began “The Tatler,” Isaac Bickerstaff, Esquire, spoke in the dedication of a gentleman who “had written Predictions, and Two or Three other Pieces in my Name, which had render’d it famous through all Parts of Europe; and by an inimitable Spirit and Humour, raised it to as high a Pitch of Reputation as it could possibly arrive at.”