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 BOYSE. 189 from the ruin that seems to threaten me if I continue longer in the condition I am in : and as I should be willing most gratefully to repay any assistance I might receive out of my lord's bounty, so I should ever retain a deep impression of the obligation. I humbly beg you will forgive this liberty, and believe me, with the greatest gratitude and esteem, " Yours, &c "P.S. Mrs. Boyse has so deep a sense of your goodness that it is with difficulty she undertakes this." Mrs. Boyse was generally employed in conveying his letters of this description, and if she felt so much on delivering the above, her feelings were again tried on the 16th of the same month, when Boyse sent another impor- tunate letter, which Dr. Birch probably found it necessary to disregard. When he had thus exhausted the patience of some, he made attempts on the humanity of others by yet meaner expedients. One of these was to employ his wife in circulating a report that he was just expiring; and many of his friends were surprised to meet the man in the streets to-day, to whom they had yesterday sent relief, as to a person on the verge of dissolution. Proposals for works written, or to be written, was a more common trick: besides the translation of Voltaire, we find him, in one of his letters, thanking Sir Hans Sloane's goodness in encou- raging his proposals for a life of Sir Francis Drake. But these expedients soon lost their effect: his friends became ashamed of his repeated frauds and the general meanness of his conduct, and could only mix with their contempt some hope that his brain was disordered. In 1743, he published without his name, an ode on the battle of Dettingen, entitled "Albion's Triumph," a frag- ment of which is printed in the last edition of the Poets. In 1745 we find him at Reading, where he was employed by the late Mr. David Henry in compiling a work, pub- lished in 1747, in two volumes octavo, under the title of