mountains, it is frequently a torrent, and is thus, except in the last few miles, unnavigable for either boats or rafts.
BOBRUISK, a town and formerly a first-class fortress of
Russia, in the government of Minsk, and 100 m. by rail S.E.
of the town of Minsk, in 53° 15′ N. lat. and 28° 52′ E. long., on
the right bank of the Berezina river, and on the railway from
Libau and Vilna to Ekaterinoslav. Pop. (1860) 23,761; (1897)
35,177, of whom one-half were Jews. In the reign of Alexander I.
there was erected here, at the confluence of the Bobruiska with
the Berezina, nearly a mile from the town, a fort, which successfully
withstood a bombardment by Napoleon in 1812, and was
made equal to the best in Europe by the emperor Nicholas I.
It was demolished in 1897, the defences being antiquated. The
town has a military hospital and a departmental college. There
are ironworks and flour-mills; and corn and timber are shipped
to Libau. The town was half burnt down in 1902.
BOCAGE, MANUEL MARIA BARBOSA DE (1765–1805),
Portuguese poet, was a native of Setubal. His father had held
important judicial and administrative appointments, and his
mother, from whom he took his last surname, was the daughter
of a Portuguese vice-admiral of French birth who had fought
at the battle of Matapan. Bocage began to make verses in
infancy, and being somewhat of a prodigy grew up to be flattered,
self-conscious and unstable. At the age of fourteen, he suddenly
left school and joined the 7th infantry regiment; but tiring of
garrison life at Setubal after two years, he decided to enter the
navy. He proceeded to the royal marine academy in Lisbon,
but instead of studying he pursued love adventures, and for the
next five years burnt incense on many altars, while his retentive
memory and extraordinary talent for improvisation gained him
a host of admirers and turned his head. The Brazilian modinhas,
little rhymed poems sung to a guitar at family parties, were then
in great vogue, and Bocage added to his fame by writing a number
of these, by his skill in extemporizing verses on a given theme,
and by allegorical idyllic pieces, the subjects of which are similar
to those of Watteau’s and Boucher’s pictures. In 1786 he was
appointed guardamarinha in the Indian navy, and he reached
Goa by way of Brazil in October. There he came into an ignorant
society full of petty intrigue, where his particular talents found
no scope to display themselves; the glamour of the East left
him unmoved and the climate brought on a serious illness. In
these circumstances he compared the heroic traditions of Portugal
in Asia, which had induced him to leave home, with the reality,
and wrote his satirical sonnets on “The Decadence of the
Portuguese Empire in Asia,” and those addressed to Affonso
de Albuquerque and D. João de Castro. The irritation caused
by these satires, together with rivalries in love affairs, made it
advisable for him to leave Goa, and early in 1789 he obtained the
post of lieutenant of the infantry company at Damaun; but
he promptly deserted and made his way to Macao, where he
arrived in July-August. According to a modern tradition much
of the Lusiads had been written there, and Bocage probably
travelled to China under the influence of Camoens, to whose life
and misfortunes he loved to compare his own. Though he
escaped the penalty of his desertion, he had no resources and
lived on friends, whose help enabled him to return to Lisbon in
the middle of the following year.
Once back in Portugal he found his old popularity, and resumed his vagabond existence. The age was one of reaction against the Pombaline reforms, and the famous intendant of police, Manique, in his determination to keep out French revolutionary and atheistic propaganda, forbade the importation of foreign classics and the discussion of all liberal ideas. Hence the only vehicle of expression left was satire, which Bocage employed with an unsparing hand. His poverty compelled him to eat and sleep with friends like the turbulent friar José Agostinho de Macedo (q.v.), and he soon fell under suspicion with Manique. He became a member of the New Arcadia, a literary society founded in 1790, under the name of Elmano Sadino, but left it three years later. Though including in its ranks most of the poets of the time, the New Arcadia produced little of real merit, and before long its adherents became enemies and descended to an angry warfare of words. But Bocage’s reputation among the general public and with foreign travellers grew year by year. Beckford, the author of Vathek, for instance, describes him as “a pale, limber, odd-looking young man, the queerest but perhaps the most original of God’s poetical creatures. This strange and versatile character may be said to possess the true wand of enchantment which at the will of its master either animates or petrifies.” In 1797 enemies of Bocage belonging to the New Arcadia delated him to Manique, who on the pretext afforded by some anti-religious verses, the Epistola á Marilia, and by his loose life, arrested him when he was about to flee the country and lodged him in the Limoeiro, where he spent his thirty-second birthday. His sufferings induced him to a speedy recantation, and after much importuning of friends, he obtained his transfer in November from the state prison to that of the Inquisition, then a mild tribunal, and shortly afterwards recovered his liberty. He returned to his bohemian life and subsisted by writing empty Elogios Dramaticos for the theatres, printing volumes of verses and translating the didactic poems of Delille, Castel and others, some second-rate French plays and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. These resources and the help of brother Freemasons just enabled him to exist, and a purifying influence came into his life in the shape of a real affection for the two beautiful daughters of D. Antonio Bersane Leite, which drew from him verses of true feeling mixed with regrets for the past. He would have married the younger lady, D. Anna Perpetua (Analia), but excesses had ruined his health. In 1801 his poetical rivalry with Macedo became more acute and personal, and ended by drawing from Bocage a stinging extempore poem, Pena de Talião, which remains a monument to his powers of invective. In 1804 the malady from which he suffered increased, and the approach of death inspired some beautiful sonnets, including one directed to D. Maria (Marcia), elder sister of Analia, who visited and consoled him. He became reconciled to his enemies, and breathed his last on the 21st of December 1805. His end recalled that of Camoens, for he expired in poverty on the eve of the French invasion, while the singer of the Lusiads just failed to see the occupation of Portugal by the duke of Alva’s army. The gulf that divides the life and achievements of these two poets is accounted for, less by difference of talent and temperament than by their environment, and it gives an accurate measure of the decline of Portugal in the two centuries that separate 1580 from 1805.
To Beckford, Bocage was “a powerful genius,” and Link was struck by his nervous expression, harmonious versification and the fire of his poetry. He employed every variety of lyric and made his mark in all. His roundels are good, his epigrams witty, his satires rigorous and searching, his odes often full of nobility, but his fame must rest on his sonnets, which almost rival those of Camoens in power, elevation of thought and tender melancholy, though they lack the latter’s scholarly refinement of phrasing. So dazzled were contemporary critics by his brilliant and inspired extemporizations that they ignored Bocage’s licentiousness, and overlooked the slightness of his creative output and the artificial character of most of his poetry. In 1871 a monument was erected to the poet in the chief square of Setubal, and the centenary of his death was kept there with much circumstance in 1905.
The best editions of his collected works are those of I. F. da Silva, with a biographical and literary study by Rebello da Silva, in 6 vols. (Lisbon, 1853), and of Dr Theophilo Braga, in 8 vols. (Oporto, 1875–1876). See also I. F. da Silva Diccionario Bibliographico Portuguez, vol. vi. pp. 45-53, and vol. xvi. pp. 260-264; Dr T. Braga, Bocage, sua vida e epoca litteraria (Oporto, 1902). A striking portrait of Bocage by H. J. da Silva was engraved by Bartolozzi, who spent his last years in Lisbon. (E. Pr.)
BOCAGE (from O. Fr. boscage, Late Lat. boscum, a wood), a
French topographical term applied to several regions of France,
the commonest characteristics of which are a granite formation
and an undulating or hilly surface, consisting largely of heath
or reclaimed land, and dotted with clumps of trees. The
most important districts designated by the word are (1) the
Bocage of Normandy, which comprises portions of the
