Abel Boyer

Boyer's education at the academy of Puylaurens was interrupted by the religious disturbances, and leaving France with his maternal uncle Pierre Campdomerc, 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 William Camden's Latin correspondence (London, 1691).

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 John Dryden.

[3] 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.

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.

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 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.

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.