ted 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 Zurich, 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 Zurich, 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 uber die poetischen Gemalde der Dichter_ (1741), in which
he pleaded for the freedom of the imagination from