Rogers and Fowle, printers in Boston, who were publishing a new magazine, begun in 1743, called _The American Magazine_, announced that they would print in it by instalment a new history of the English colonies. They changed the plan subsequently so as to issue the book in larger type, in quarterly numbers, and in this form there appeared in January, 1747, the first number, with a temporary title, which read: _A summary, historical and political, of the first planting, progressive improvements and present state of the British settlements in North America; with some transient accounts of the bordering French and Spanish settlements. By W. D., M. D., No. 1. To be continued_. Boston, 1747.[336] The author soon became known as Dr. William Douglass, the Scotch physician living in Boston,—“honest and downright Dr. Douglass,” as Adam Smith later chose to call him. He had drawn (pp. 235-38), in contrast to Admiral Warren, a severe character of Admiral Knowles, whose conduct, which occasioned the impressment riot then recent, was fresh in memory. Knowles seems to have instituted a suit for libel, which led to a rather strained amend by Douglass in the preface to the first volume, when the numbers were collected in 1749, and were issued with a title much the same as before, _A Summary, historical and political, of the first planting,_ etc., _containing_—here follow five heads.[337] The character which he had given of Knowles, he says, was written out of passionate warmth and indiscretion, merely “in affection to Boston and the country of New England, his _altera patria_,” and then adds that he has suppressed it in the completed volume.[338] The second volume is dated 1751, and Douglass died in 1752.[339] To his second volume (1751) he adds what he calls “a supplement to the first volume and introduction to the second volume,” in which he hints at the offence he had given Shirley and Knowles—the latter’s suit for libel forcing him to recant, as we have seen—by saying, “If facts related in truth offend any governor, commodore, or other great officer,” the author “will not renounce impartiality and become sycophant.” He further charges upon “the great man of the province for the time being,” as he calls Shirley, the “impeding, or rather defeating, this public-spirited, laborious undertaking,” as he characterizes his own book.