with a mission to form a league between Frederick II. of Denmark and certain German princes to assist Henry of Navarre. He was next despatched on a secret mission to France; and in 1588 he was sent to the Hague as minister, a post which demanded great diplomatic skill, for it was in the Netherlands that the power of Spain had to be fought. The essential difficulties of his mission were complicated by the intrigues of the queen’s ministers at home, and Bodley repeatedly begged that he might be recalled. He was finally permitted to return to England in 1596, but finding his preferment obstructed by the jarring interests of Burleigh and Essex, he retired from public life. He was knighted on the 18th of April 1604. He is, however, remembered specially as the founder of the Bodleian at Oxford, practically the earliest public library in Europe (see Libraries). He determined, he said, “to take his farewell of state employments and to set up his staff at the library door in Oxford.” In 1598 his offer to restore the old library was accepted by the university. Bodley not only used his private fortune in his undertaking, but induced many of his friends to make valuable gifts of books. In 1611 he began its permanent endowment, and at his death in London on the 28th of January 1613, the greater part of his fortune was left to it. He was buried in the choir of Merton College chapel where a monument of black and white marble was erected to him.
Sir Thomas wrote his own life to the year 1609, which, with the first draft of the statutes drawn up for the library, and his letters to the librarian, Thomas James, was published by Thomas Hearne, under the title of Reliquiae Bodleianae, or Authentic Remains of Sir Thomas Bodley (London, 1703, 8vo).
BODMER, JOHANN JAKOB (1698–1783), Swiss-German author, was born at Greifensee, near Zürich, on the 19th of July 1698. After first studying theology and then trying a commercial career, he finally found his vocation in letters. In 1725 he was appointed professor of Helvetian history in Zürich, a chair which he held for half a century, and in 1735 became a member of the “Grosser Rat.” He published (1721–1723), in conjunction with J. J. Breitinger (1701–1774) and several others, Die Discourse der Mahlern, a weekly journal after the model of the Spectator. Through his prose translation of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1732) and his successful endeavours to make a knowledge of English literature accessible to Germany, he aroused the hostile criticism of Gottsched (q.v.) and his school, a struggle which ended in the complete discomfiture of the latter. His most important writings are the treatises Von dem Wunderbaren in der Poesie (1740) and Kritische Betrachtungen über die poetischen Gemälde der Dichter (1741), in which he pleaded for the freedom of the imagination from the restriction imposed upon it by French pseudo-classicism. Bodmer’s epics Die Sündfluth (1751) and Noah (1751) are weak imitations of Klopstock’s Messias, and his plays are entirely deficient in dramatic qualities. He did valuable service to German literature by his editions of the Minnesingers and part of the Nibelungenlied. He died at Zürich on the 2nd of January 1783.
See T. W. Danzel, Gottsched und seine Zeit (Leipzig, 1848); J. Crüger, J. C. Gottsched, Bodmer und Breitinger (Stuttgart, 1884); F. Braitmaier, Geschichte der poetischen Theorie und Kritik von den Diskursen der Maler bis auf Lessing (Leipzig, 1888); Denkschrift zu Bodmers 200. Geburtstag (Zürich, 1900).
BODMIN, a market town and municipal borough in the Bodmin parliamentary division of Cornwall, England, the county town, 3012 m. W.N.W. of Plymouth, on branches of the Great Western and London & South-Western railways. Pop. (1901) 5353. It lies between two hills in a short valley opening westward upon that of the Camel, at the southern extremity of the high open Bodmin Moor. The large church of St Petrock, mainly Perpendicular, has earlier portions, and a late Norman font. East of it there is a ruined Decorated chapel of St Thomas of Canterbury, with a crypt. A tower of Tudor date, in the cemetery, marks the site of a chapel of the gild of the Holy Rood. Part of the buildings of a Franciscan friary, founded c. 1240, are incorporated in the market-house, and the gateway remains in an altered form. At Bodmin are a prison, with civil and naval departments, the county gaol and asylum, the headquarters of the constabulary, and those of the duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry. Cattle, sheep and horse fairs are held, and there is a considerable agricultural trade. The borough is under a mayor, four aldermen and twelve councillors. Area, 2797 acres.
Traces of Roman occupation have been found in the western part of the parish, belonging to the first century A.D. Possibly tin-mining was carried on here at that period. The grant of a charter by King Edred to the prior and canons of Bodmin (Bomine, Bodman, Bodmyn) in respect of lands in Devonshire appears in an inspeximus of 1252. To its ecclesiastical associations it owed its importance at the time of the Domesday survey, when St Petrock held the manor of Bodmin, wherein were sixty-eight houses and one market. To successive priors, as mesne lords, it also owed its earliest municipal privileges. King John’s charter to the prior and convent, dated the 17th of July 1199, contained a clause (subsequently cancelled by Richard II.) by which burgesses were exempt from being impleaded, touching any tenements in their demesne, except before the king and his chief justice. Richard of Cornwall, king of the Romans, confirmed to the burgesses their gild merchant, Edward I. the pesage of tin, and Edward II. a market for tin and wool. Queen Elizabeth in 1563 constituted the town a free borough and the burgesses a body corporate, granting at the same time two fairs and a Saturday market. There are still held also three other fairs whose origin is uncertain. An amended charter granted in 1594 remained in force until 1789, when the corporation became extinct owing to the diminution of the burgesses. By virtue of a new charter of incorporation granted in 1798 and remodelled by the act of 1835, the corporation now consists of a mayor, four aldermen and twelve councillors. The first members for Bodmin were summoned in 1295. Retaining both its members in 1832, losing one in 1868 and the other in 1885, it has now become merged in the south-eastern division of the county. From 1715 to 1837 the assizes were generally held alternately at Launceston and Bodmin; since 1837 they have been held at Bodmin only. A court of probate has also been held at Bodmin since 1773. A festival known as “Bodmin Riding” was formerly celebrated here on the Sunday and Monday following St Thomas’s day (July 7). It is thought by some to have been instituted in 1177 to celebrate the recovery of the bones of St Petrock.
See Victoria County History, Cornwall; John Maclean, Parochial and Family History of the Deanery of Trigg Minor, Cornwall (3 vols., 1873–1879).
BODÖ, a seaport on the north-western coast of Norway, in Nordland amt (county), lat. 67° 17′ N. Pop. (1900) 4827. The rock-bound harbour admits large vessels, and there is a brisk trade in fish and eider-down. The neighbouring country has many scenic attractions. Sixty miles inland (E.) rises the great massif of Sulitelma on the Swedish frontier, with its copper mines, broad snow-fields and glaciers. The fjords of the district include the imposing Beierenfjord, the Saltenfjord, and the Skjerstadfjord, at the narrow mouths of which, between islands, a remarkable cataract (Saltström) is formed at the turn of the tide. On this fjord is Skjerstad, a large scattered village.
BODONI, GIAMBATTISTA (1740–1813), Italian printer, was born in 1740 at Saluzzo in Piedmont, where his father owned a printing establishment. While yet a boy he began to engrave on wood. He at length went to Rome, and there became a compositor for the press of the Propaganda. He made himself acquainted with the Oriental languages, and thus was enabled to render essential service to the Propaganda press, by restoring and accurately distributing the types of several Oriental alphabets which had fallen into disorder. The infante Don Ferdinand, afterwards duke of Parma, having established, about 1760, a printing-house on the model of those in Paris, Madrid and Turin, Bodoni was placed at the head of this establishment, which he soon rendered the first of the kind in Europe. The beauty of his typography, &c., leaves nothing further to be desired; but the intrinsic value of his editions is seldom equal to their outward splendour. His Homer, however, is a truly magnificent work; and, indeed, his Greek letters are faultless imitations of the best
