Now, if all dealers in dates, of the olden time, would discriminate, between the old style and the new, we should be spared a vast deal of vexation; and the good people of Boston, notional as they proverbially are, would not appear, in their creditable zeal to do honor to a public benefactor, to have given him a funeral oration, a twelve month before he was dead. If the year be taken to begin, on the first of January, then Dr. Allen is right; and Peter Faneuil died March 3, 1743. But if it did not begin, till the twenty-fifth of March, and, legally, it certainly did not, before 1752, when the new style was adopted, in Great Britain, and the Provinces, then Eliot, and Pemberton, and the title page of the oration, and the records of the court, and the mourning ring are right, and Peter Faneuil died, in 1742. An illustration of this principle may be found, on the title page of the oration itself. It is stated to have been delivered, March 14, 1742, and printed in 1743. Having been delivered near the close of the year 1742, it was printed, doubtless, soon after March 25, which was New Year's day for 1743. The public journals, nevertheless, seem to have adopted, and adhered to the idea, that January 1, was the first day of the historical year, long before the style was altered; and thus, in the Weekly News Letter, published in Boston, Faneuil is stated to have died, in 1743. This journal contains an obituary notice. A few imperfect numbers of this paper are all that remain, and its extreme rarity leads me to copy the obituary here:-- "Thursday, March 10, 1743. On Thursday last, dyed at his seat in this Town, PETER FANEUIL, Esq., whose remains, we hear, are to be enterred this afternoon; a gentleman, possessed of a very ample fortune, and a most generous spirit, whose noble benefaction to this town, and constant employment of a great number of tradesmen, artificers and labourers, to whom he was a liberal paymaster; whose hospitality to all, and secret unbounded chirity to the poor--made his life a public blessing, and his death a general loss to, and universally regretted by, the inhabitants; who had been so sensible of their obligations to him, for the sumptuous edifice, which he raised at his private expence, for their Market house and Town Hall, that, at a general town meeting, as a testimony of their gratitude, they voted, that the place of their future consultations should be called by his name forever: in doing which they perpetuated their own honor as much as his memory; for, by this record posterity will know the most publick spirited man, in all regards, that ever yet appeared on the Northern continent of America, was a member of their community." In the Boston Evening Post of March 7, 1743, in a brief notice of Peter Faneuil's death, the disease of which he died is said to have been "_dropsey_."