the composition … cost far above £100," he says. It was issued in forty-four shilling numbers, each consisting of thirty-two pages, and was begun in 1751, and the last number appeared in 1755. This was one of the earliest gazetteers published in England, and certainly the most important. Writing fifty years after its completion, Dyer, the Exeter bookseller, in 1805, termed it, at that date, "the best, the most comprehensive, and even the most learned Gazetteer in the English language"; but if we may trust Brice in the matter, he lost money on the publication.
His last published work was an heroic-comic poem entitled The Mobiad, being a description of an Exeter election "by Democritus Juvenal, Moral Professor of Ridicule and plaguy-pleasant Fellow of Stingtickle College; vulgarly Andrew Brice." London, 1770.
Dr. Brushfield has shown good reasons for attributing to Andrew Brice, assisted by Benjamin Bowring, of Chumleigh, the composition of The Exmoor Scolding and Courtship that first appeared in Brice's Journal.[1]
Brice's latter days were spent in strife with his nephew, Thomas Brice, who was connected with the Exeter Journal, and with Mr. Andrews and B. Trewman, who had been employed in his printing office, and who left him and started a new paper on their own account, the Exeter Mercury.
He was a disappointed man in his family. He was twice married, but both his wives, and all his children, died before him. He himself died of general decay, at the age of eighty-three, on 7 November, 1773. In his will he desired that he might be attended to his grave
- ↑ "The Exmoor Scolding and Courtship," by T. N. Brushfield, M.D., in the Transactions of the Devonshire Association for1888.
