their speeches, and he had even succeeded in becoming an occasional 'ear-witness' of the debates themselves. When he was threatened at the beginning of 1729 with arrest by the printers of the votes, whose monopoly they accused him of infringing, he asserted that for thirty years in his History of King William, his Annals, and in his Political State, he had given reports of parliamentary debates without being molested. The threat induced him to discontinue the publication of the debates. He intended to resume the work, but failed to carry out his intention. He died in a house which he had built for himself at Chelsea, London. Besides conducting the periodicals mentioned, Boyer began in 1705 to edit the Post-boy, a thrice-a-week London news-sheet. His connection with it ended in August 1709, through a quarrel with the proprietor, when Boyer started on his own account a True Post-boy, which seems to have been short-lived. A Case which he printed in vindication of his right to use the name of Post-boy for his new venture gives some curious particulars of the way in which the news-sheets of the time were manufactured. Boyer was also the author of pamphlets, in one of which, An Account of the State and Progress of the present Negotiations of Peace, he attacked Jonathan Swift, who writes in the Journal to Stella (16 October 1711), after dining with Bolingbroke: Boyer was discharged from custody through the intervention, he says, of Robert Harley, to whom he boasts of having rendered services. Though he professed a strict political impartiality in the conduct of his principal periodicals, Boyer was a zealous whig. For this reason doubtless Alexander Pope gave him a niche in The Dunciad (book ii. 413), where, under the soporific influence of Dulness, "Boyer the state, and Law the stage gave o'er" his crime, according to Pope's explanatory note, being that he was "a voluminous compiler of annals, political collections, &c." Works Boyer was a prolific author: the British Library's 1880 catalogue used nearly four folio pages of print to list his works. The compleat French master for ladies and gentlemen: being a new method, to learn with ease and delight the French tongue, 1694 Character of the Virtues and Vices of the Age, 1695 A Geographical and Historical Description of those Parts of Europe which are the Seat of War, 1696 Royal Dictionary, 1699 Achilles, or, Iphigenia