sex, and he died there on 27 March 1817. He was buried in Hampstead Church. Among his principal paintings may be mentioned: a portrait of Alderman John Boydell, exhibited at the Academy in 1772, and engraved by Valentine Green: a portrait of his wife, when Miss North, in the character of Juno, exhibited in 1773; and 'Coriolanus taking leave of his Family,' also exhibited in 1773. He engraved some excellent plates in mezzotinto: 'Hansloe and his Mother,' after Rembrandt; 'The Holy Family,' after Carlo Maratti; 'The Virgin and Child,' after Parmigiano; 'Charles I,' after A. van Dyck.
[Magazine of the Fine Arts, ii. 410; MS. notes in the British Museum.]
BOYER, ABEL (1667–1729), miscellaneous writer, was born on 24 June 1667, at Castres, in Upper Languedoc, where his father, who suffered for his protestant zeal, was one of the two consuls or chief magistrates. Boyer's education at the academy of Puylaurens was interrupted by the religious disturbances, and leaving France with an uncle, a noted Huguenot preacher, he finished his studies at Franeker in Friesland, after a brief episode, it is said, of military service in Holland. Proceeding to England in 1689 he fell into great poverty, and is represented as transcribing and preparing for the press Dr. Thomas Smith's edition of Camden's Latin correspondence (London, 1691). A good classical scholar, Boyer became in 1692 tutor to Allen Bathurst, afterwards first Earl Bathurst, whose father Sir Benjamin was treasurer of the household of the princess, afterwards Queen Anne. Probably through this connection he was appointed French teacher to her son William, duke of Gloucester, for whose use he prepared and to whom he dedicated 'The Complete French Master,' published in 1694. Disappointed of advancement on account of his zeal for whig principles, he abandoned tuition for authorship. In December 1699 he produced on the London stage, with indifferent success, a modified translation in blank verse of Racine's 'Iphigénie,' which was published in 1700 as 'Achilles or Iphigenia in Aulis, a tragedy written by Mr. Boyer.' A second edition of it appeared in 1714 as 'The Victim, or Achilles and Iphigenia in Aulis,' in an 'advertisement' prefixed to which Boyer stated that in its first form it had 'passed the correction and approbation' of Dryden. In 1702 appeared at the Hague the work which has made Boyer's a familiar name, his 'Dictionnaire Royal Français et Anglais, divisé en deux parties,' ostensibly composed for the use of the Duke of Gloucester, then dead. It was much superior to every previous work of the kind, and has been the basis of very many subsequent French-English dictionaries; the last English unabridged edition is that of 1816; the edition published at Paris in 1860 is stated to be the 41st. For the English-French section Boyer claimed the merit of containing a more complete English dictionary than any previous one, the English words and idioms in it being defined and explained as well as accompanied by their French equivalents. In the French preface to the whole work Boyer said that 1,000 English words not in any other English dictionary had been added to his by Richard Savage, whom he spoke of as his friend, and who assisted him in several of his French manuals and miscellaneous compilations and translations published subsequently. Among the English versions of French works executed in whole or in part by Boyer was a popular translation of Fénelon's 'Télémaque,' of which a twelfth edition appeared in 1728.
In 1702 Boyer published a 'History of William III,' which included one of James II, and in 1703 he began to issue 'The History of the Reign of Queen Anne digested into annals,' a yearly register of political and miscellaneous occurrences, containing several plans and maps illustrating the military operations of the war of the Spanish succession. Before the last volume, the eleventh, of this work appeared in 1713, he had commenced the publication of a monthly periodical of the same kind, 'The Political State of Great Britain, being an impartial account of the most material occurrences, ecclesiastical, civil, and military, in a monthly letter to a friend in Holland' (38 volumes, 1711-29). Its contents, which were those of a monthly newspaper, included abstracts of the chief political pamphlets published on both sides, and, like the 'Annals,' is, both from its form and matter, very useful for reference. 'The Political State' is, moreover, particularly noticeable as being the first periodical, issued at brief intervals, which contained a parliamentary chronicle, and in which parliamentary debates were reported with comparative regularity and with some approximation to accuracy. In the case of the House of Lords' reports various devices, such as giving only the initials of the names of the speakers, were resorted to in order to escape punishment, but in the case of the House of Commons the entire names were frequently given. According to Boyer's own account (preface to his folio History of Queen Anne, and to vol. xxxvii. of the 'Political State) he had been furnished by members of both houses of parliament (among whom he mentioned Lord Stanhope) with reports of their speeches, and he had even succeeded in becoming an occasional 'ear-witness' of the
