Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 05.djvu/422

 on' his logic 'to religious use and application.' He had ceased to be an admirer of the new or of any poor law, when he expanded two articles contributed by him to the 'British Critic' into a volume entitled 'The Rights of the Poor and Christian Almsgiving vindicated, or the State and Character of the Poor and the Conduct and Duties of the Rich exhibited and illustrated,' 1841. The work breathed a strong spirit of sympathy with the poor, whose destitution, he maintained, was in a great multitude of cases not their own fault, and he illustrated this view by detailed statements, taken chiefly from the reports of the Mendicity Society, to show the inadequacy of the incomes of numbers of the wage-earning classes for the maintenance of themselves and their families. Following Dr. Chalmers, Bosanquet argued that individual charity, and not the state or a public legal provision, should supply whatever was deficient in the pecuniary circumstances of the poor. In 1843 appeared his 'Principia, a series of essays on the principles manifesting themselves in these last times in Religion, Philosophy, and Politics.' The work assailed modern liberalism and its results, intellectual and social, as interpreted by Bosanquet, who identified his age with those 'last times' of national degeneracy and apostasy which were to precede the second advent. His 'Letter to Lord John Russell on the 'Safety of the Nation,' 1848, was animated by the same spirit of hostility to modern liberalism, and by a desire to substitute a paternal despotism for parliamentary government. Bosanquet was a diligent student of theology. Among his writings are several dissertations on portions of the Bible, and for the better understanding of the Old Testament he is said to have begun to learn Hebrew when he was between sixty and seventy. His numerous writings display earnestness, piety, and benevolence, with considerable animation of style; but he is diffuse, often fanciful, and deficient in reasoning power. There is an ample list of them in the catalogue of the British Museum library. Besides those already referred to may be mentioned the 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, its arguments examined and exposed,' or at least denounced, second edition 1845; his 'Eirenicon, Toleration, Intolerance, Christianity, the Church of England and Dissent,' 1867, in which, after discovering good and evil in all communions, he pronounced an outward union of churches to be impracticable, and if practicable to be undesirable; and, as illustrative of his peculiar views on theology and the typological exegesis of scripture, 'The Successive Visions of the Cherubim distinguished and newly interpreted, showing the progressive revelation through them of the Incarnation and of the Gospel of Redemption and Sanctification,' 1871. His latest publication was 'Hindoo Chronology and Antediluvian History,' an attempt to synchronise the two, and to establish a connection between Indian mythology and the earliest personages of the Bible. The volume was a reprint, with elucidations by Bosanquet, of the first part of a 'Key to Hindoo Chronology,' Cambridge, 1820, the authorship of which he ascribed to a certain Alexander Hamilton, slightly known as an orientalist.

In 1843 Bosanquet succeeded to the family estates. He was for thirty-five years chairman of the Monmouthshire quarter sessions. Beneficent to the poor, he promoted useful local institutions and enterprises. He died at his seat, Dingestow Court, 27 Dec. 1882.

[Bosanquet's Writings; obituary notice in Monmouthshire Beacon for 30 Dec. 1882; Burke's Landed Gentry; Catalogue of the Graduates of Oxford.]  BOSCAWEN, — According to Hals, one of the Cornish historians, the first Boscawen who settled in Cornwall was an Irishman whose name does not appear to be now known; but whatever it may have been, it was soon exchanged for that of the place (which still bears the same name) in the parish of St. Buryan, a few miles from the Land's End, where he took up his abode, viz. at Boscawen Ros — the valley of elder trees. Other branches of the Boscawens settled in later times at Tregameer, in St. Columb Major, and at Trevallock in Creed, or St. Stephen's. All traces of the marriages of the earliest Boscawens seem to be lost until we reach the reign of Edward I, when Henry de Boscawen (about 1292) took to wife Hawise Trewoof. In 1335 John de Boscawen. by marrying an heiress, Joan de Tregothnan, acquired the Tregothnan property on the banks of the river Fal, where the family seat still is; the present building, however, dating only from 1815. John's son likewise married an heiress, Joan de Albalanda, or Blanchlnnd, whose lands were situated on the opposite side of the river to Tregothnan, in the parish of Ken; and other marriages between members of this family and Dangrous of Carclew, the Tolvernes, the Trewartnenicks, and the Tregarricks, extended and consolidated the interests of the Boscawens on and near the banks of the Fal. They also intermarried with other Cornish families, such as the Arundells, the Bassetts, the St. Aubyns, the Lowers, the Godolphins, the Carminows, the Trenowiths, and the Trevanions. At the coronation of Henry VII, Richard Boscawen paid 