Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 05.djvu/305

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Boece
297
Boece

Burnett, who afterwards lived at Standlake and Ducklington in Oxfordshire, and whose grandchildren in the next century petitioned the university for relief, as being very poor and infirm labouring people.

Bodley was buried on 29 March 1613 in the chapel of his college, Merton, as he had desired in his will, with great ceremony, having bequeathed 666l. 13s. 4d. for the purpose of providing mourning for many persons (including sixty-seven poor scholars) and a dinner. Two volumes of academic verses were printed in commemoration of him—the one written by members of his own college, the other by members of the university in general -as well as a funeral oration, delivered by Sir Isaue Wake, the public omtor. In 1615 a monument was erected in Merton chapel, executed by Nicholas Stone,a well-known sculptor, for which Bodlcy‘s executor, William Hakewill, paid 200l. The library contains a very fine full-length portrait (several times engraved), which has been assigned, but (as dates show) incorrectly, to Corn. Jansen, as well as one other very inferior portrait and a marble bust.

[Wood’s Athenæ Oxon.; Reliquiæ Bodleianæ. 1703; Lodges Portraits. where one of Bodley's despatches is printed from a Harl. MS.; Macray's Annals of the Bodleian Library, 1868; Bodley’s will (a contemporary copy) in Bodl. MS. Addit. A. 186; Calendars of the Domestic State Papers; Notes and Queries. 6th series, ii. 423. Twenty-nine letters are printed in vol. i. of Collins’s Sidney Papers, 1746, and there are some in Murdin's Burghley State Papers, 1759; reports of his negotiations and several letters are among the Marquis of Bath's MSS. at Longleat.]

W. D. M.

BOECE or BOETHIUS, HECTOR (1465?–1536), belonged to the family of Boyis, or Bois, of Panbride in Angus, the common form of Boece being a retranslation of the Latin Boethius. His father was probably Alexander Boyis, who appears as a burgess of Dundee about the end of the fifteenth century in several entries in the Great Seal Register. Boece calls Dundee his country (‘patria’), and alludes to the Panbride family as a cadet when he mentions that the estate, along with the hand of a coheiress, was given to his great grandfather, Hugh, whose father had fallen at Dupplin. From Dundee he took the designation of Deidonanus, accepting ambitiously, says Buchanan, the common derivation of Deidonum for the town at the mouth of the Tay, which that writer derives from Tao Dunum, the Hill of Tay. From Dundee, where he received his first education, Boece passed, like many of his countrymen, to Paris, then the most frequented university in Europe. Assuming his birth to have been in 1465, its probable but not certain date, it is not likely that the commencement of his studies at Paris was later than 1485. After finishing his undergraduate course under the severe discipline of the college of Montaigu, reorganised in 1483 on the principle of monastic poverty by James Standone, a native of Brabant, an active educational reformer, and at one time rector of the university, Boece became a regent, or professor, in this college, probably from 1492 to 1498. He commemorates amongst his contemporaries in the college Peter Syrus, the theologian; Peter Rolandus, his instructor in logic; John Gasserus, the canonist-names now forgotten; but also one which will live as long as literature, Erasmus, ‘the splendour and ornament of our age.' Thirty-two years later, Erasmus in a complimentary letter congratulates Boece, then principal of King’s College in Aberdeen, upon the progress Scotland had made in the liberal arts, and sent him a catalogue of his works. In another letter of a humorous turn, while disclaiming the title of poet which Boece had given him, he communicated two attempts in poetry under strict injunctions not to publish them. Of his own countrymen then studying in Paris, Boece mentions Patrick Panter, another of the worthies of Angus, afterwards secretary of James IV and abbot of Cambuskenneth, to whom the king entrusted the education of his natural son, Alexander Stewart, before sending him abroad to finish it under Erasmus; Walter Ogilvy, celebrated for oratory; George Dundas, a learned scholar both in Greek and Latin, afterwards grand-master in Scotland of the Knights of Jerusalem; and John Major, the theologian, logician, and historian, who, returning like Boece to Scotland, introduced the new learning in Glasgow and St. Andrews, and had Knox and Buchanan for pupils. About 1498 Boece became acquainted with William Elphinstone, bishop of Aberdeen since 1483-4, who had served in several high offices at home as well as embassies abroad, and had kept up his knowledge of what was passing in the French universities. Elphinstone had himself taught law, both at Paris and Orleans, between 1402 and 1471, and he now required Boece's aid in carrying out the favourite project of his old age, the foundation of a university in Aberdeen. Four years before, Elphinstone had obtained a bull from Pope Alexander VI at the request of James IV, on a preamble stating that the north parts of his kingdom were inhabited by a rude, illiterate, and savage people, and erecting in the city of old Aberdeen a ‘studium generale’ and uni-