1745, and when his will
was opened it was found that he had left all his property to found St.
Patrick's Asylum for lunatics and incurables. It stands to-day as the most
suggestive monument of his peculiar genius.

THE WORKS OF SWIFT. From Swift's life one can readily foresee the kind of
literature he will produce. Taken together his works are a monstrous satire
on humanity; and the spirit of that satire is shown clearly in a little
incident of his first days in London. There was in the city at that time a
certain astrologer named Partridge, who duped the public by calculating
nativities from the stars, and by selling a yearly almanac predicting
future events. Swift, who hated all shams, wrote, with a great show of
learning, his famous _Bickerstaff Almanac_, containing "Predictions for the
Year 1708, as Determined by the Unerring Stars." As Swift rarely signed his
name to any literary work, letting it stand or fall on its own merits, his
burlesque appeared over the pseudonym of Isaac Bickerstaff, a name
afterwards made famous by Steele in _The Tatler_. Among the predictions was
the following:

My first prediction is but a trifle; yet I will mention it to show how
ignorant those sottish pretenders to astrology are in their own concerns:
it relates to Partridge the almanack maker; I have consulted the star of
his nativity by my own rules, and find he will infallibly die upon the 29th
of March next, about eleven at night, of a raging fever; therefore I advise
him to consider of it, and settle his affairs in time.

On March 30, the day after the prediction was to be fulfilled, there
appeared in the newspapers a letter from a revenue officer giving the
details of Partridge's death, with the doings of the bailiff and the coffin
maker; and on the following morning appeared an elaborate "Elegy of Mr.
Partridge." When poor Partridge, who suddenly found himself without
customers, published a denial of the burial, Swift answered with an
elaborate "Vindication of Isaac Bickerstaff," in which he proved by
astrological rules that Partridge was dead, and that the man now in his
place was an impostor trying to cheat the heirs out of their inheritance.

This ferocious joke is suggestive of all Swift's satires. Against any case
of hypocrisy or injustice he sets up a remedy of precisely the same kind,
only more atrocious, and defends his plan with such seriousness that the
satire overwhelms the reader with a sense of monstrous falsity.