Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 05.djvu/299

Boden  and favourable to a State of Probation,' 8vo,Oxford, 1855. In 1857 Bode contested unsuccessfully with Mr. Matthew Arnold the chair of poetry at Oxford; his claims rested mainly on a volume of poems suggested by a course of reading of the old English and Scotch ballads from 1841, and published as 'Ballads from Herodotus, with an Introductory Poem,' 8vo, London, 1853; second edition,'with four additional poems,' 1854. Bode also published 'Short Occasional Poems,' 8vo, London, 1858, and a smaller volume entitled 'Hymns from the Gospel of the Day, for each Sunday and the Festivals of Our Lord,' 12mo, Oxford, 1860. In 1860 Bode was presented by the governors of the Charterhouse to the living of Castle Camps, Cambridgeshire, at the rectory house of which he died suddenly, at the age of fifty-eight, on 6 Oct. 1874.

 BODEN, JOSEPH (d. 1811), lieutenant-colonel in the East India Company's service, founder of the Boden professorship of Sanskrit in the University of Oxford—whose name is spelt Bowden in Dodswell and Miles' ‘Lists of the Indian Army’—was appointed lieutenant in the Bombay native infantry on 24 Nov. 1781. He became captain on 25 Oct. 1796, major on 12 Oct. 1802, and lieutenant-colonel on 21 May 1806. His name was borne at various times on the rolls of the 3rd, 5th, 6th, 8th, and 9th native infantry, and he held successively the offices of judge-advocate, aide-de-camp to the governor, quartermaster-general, and member of the military board at Bombay. There is no record of his field-service at the India Office. He retired from the service in 1807, and died at Lisbon, whither he had gone for the benefit of his health, on 21 Nov. 1811. On the demise of his daughter his property went to the university of Oxford, under conditions recorded on a tablet placed by his executors in Trinity Church, Cheltenham, which bears the following inscription: ‘In a vault beneath this church are deposited the remains of Eliz. Boden, who died 29 Aug. 1827, aged 19 years. By her decease the residuary property of her father, the late Lieutenant-colonel Joseph Boden, H.E.I.C. Bombay Establishment, now in the Court of Chancery and valued at 25,000l. or thereabouts, devolves to the University of Oxford, and, according to the following instructions extracted from his will, is to be “by that Body appropriated in and towards the erection and endowment of a professorship in the Sanskrit language at or in any or either of the Colleges of the said University, being of opinion that a more general and critical knowledge of the language will be the means of enabling my countrymen to proceed in the conversion of the natives of India in the Christian religion, by disseminating a knowledge of the Sacred scriptures among them, more effectually than by all other means whatever.”’ The offer was accepted by the university in convocation on 9 Nov. 1827, and the first election took place in 1832, when Professor H. H. Wilson was appointed to the Sanskrit chair. Four Sanskrit scholarships in connection with the same endowment were founded by decrees of the Court of Chancery in 1830 and 1860. Boden never wrote a book of any kind and was not himself a Sanskrit scholar (, in Notes and. Queries, 5th ser. v. 414).

 BODENHAM, JOHN (fl. 1600), reputed editor of Elizabethan miscellanies, was concerned in the publication of 'Wits Commonwealth,' 1597, 'Wits Theater.' 1598, 'Belvedere, or the Garden of the Muses,' 1000, and 'England's Helicon,' 1000. It has been usually stated that he was the editor of these collections; but the truth appears to be that he merely planned the publication of the series, and left the editorial work to others, giving the benefit of his patronage and advice to the compilers, while they in turn were willing that he should receive such credit as the publications brought. Prefixed to 'England's Helicon ' is a sonnet by 'A- B.' to ' his Loving Kinde Friend Maister John Bodenham,' which begins— 'Wits Common-wealth ' the first fruites of thy paines Drew on 'Wits Theater' the second sonne.

These lines would lead us to suppose that Bodenham was the editor of the collections of sententious extracts, 'Wits Commonwealth' and 'Wits Theater,' books which passed through many editions, and were very popular throughout the seventeenth century. But on turning to Nicholas Ling's epistle to Bodenham, prefixed to 'Wits Commonwealth,' we find that the materiul for that volume was chiefly collected by Ling, and that Bodenham had done little beyond sug