the exception of Lord Lyttleton. The reputation of his history declined with his own, and he seems to have become weary of the task himself, for the period between the years 1600 and 1758 is compressed into twenty-six pages. Previously to this, he had married a niece of Bishop Nicholson, a widow with a handsome fortune. He died in 1766 at the age of eighty. His style has a certain vigour, but is destitute of elevation either of thought or language.—T. A.
BOWER, Edward, an English portrait painter in the great Vandyck age of Charles I. He painted likenesses of Pym and Fairfax, which were engraved by Hollar.—W. T.
BOWER, Walter, a Scottish historian, was born at Haddington in 1385. He assumed a religious habit at the age of eighteen, and subsequently prosecuted his studies at Paris. After his return to his native country he was elected abbot of St. Colm in the year 1418. Fordun, the author of the Scotichronicon, had left that work unfinished at his death, and Bower agreed at the request of Sir David Stewart of Rosyth to undertake the completion of the narrative. His continuation was composed partly from the notes which Fordun had collected, and which he committed to Bower when he found himself too infirm to carry on his work, partly from the papers communicated to Bower by Sir David Stewart, and partly from the additional information which his own researches had discovered. From these various sources Bower brought down the narrative from the death of David I. in 1153, to the murder of James I. in 1437. The style, both of Fordun and his continuator, is scholastic and barbarous, but their joint production is exceedingly valuable.—(See Fordun.)—J. T.
BOWLES, Caroline Anne, the second wife of the laureate Southey, will not be forgotten amid the cluster of female poets that adorned the early part of this century. Her first production, "Ellen Fitzarthur," appeared in 1820; it was followed by "The Widow's Tale," "Solitary Hours," and a series of ballads, domestic tales, and lyrics, which are marked by genuine pathos and simplicity of thought, with an unusual grace and harmony of versification. The poems of Miss Bowles are free from any taint of affectation; their defect is occasionally a want of strength. Many of her tales, as that of "The Young Grey Head," and songs, such as "The Dying Mother to her Infant," have secured a lasting and deserved popularity. She was born in 1786; married Southey in 1839; died in 1854.—J. N.
BOWLES, George, of Chisselhurst in Kent, distinguished himself by his examinations of plants. He spent some time in Wales, and appears to have advanced the knowledge of British plants.—J. H. B.
BOWLES, William, an Irish mineralogist, who became a mining councillor in Spain, and died in that country in 1780. His "Introduction to the Natural History and Physical Geography of Spain," published in Spanish at Madrid in 1775 (third edition, 1781), and subsequently translated into several languages, with his smaller memoirs upon German and Spanish mines, were of considerable value. He also prepared a "Monograph of the Locusts," published at Madrid in 1781. Ruiz and Pavon called a genus of Peruvian plants Bowlesia in his honour.—W. S. D.
BOWLES, William Lisle, born at King's Sutton, Northamptonshire, in 1762, was a distinguished pupil of Winchester school, and afterwards became a scholar of Trinity college, Oxford. He obtained the prize for a Latin poem at that university in 1783, and took his degree in 1792. Previous to this, in 1789, he had made his first appearance as an' author, by the publication of fourteen miscellaneous sonnets, many of which were suggested by his early travels. Their unexpected success encouraged the author to obey his poetic impulse, and twenty-one were issued in a second edition. This fell into the hands of Coleridge, then a youth of seventeen, and called forth from him, both in prose and verse, expressions of the warmest admiration. In 1798 Mr. Bowles published "Coombe-Ellen," and from that year till 1850, when he died, continued to produce, with remarkable fecundity, poems of various length and merit. Among the latest of those were "St. John in Patmos," 1833, and a collection of hymns and minor pieces, entitled "The Village Verse-Book." His outward career was a smooth one. Shortly after leaving the university he took orders, and became curate of Donhead, Wilts. In 1804 he was promoted to the rectory of Bremhill in the same county, where he resided in amiable seclusion till the close of his life. In 1797 he married a daughter of the Rev. C. Wake, who died a few years before her husband. They left no family. Favourable critics of Bowles have thought it necessary to defend his position as a classic in our poetic literature—a position which must be assigned him with a certain reserve; for none of his poetry is of the highest order. But in the paths which fit his genius he moves most gracefully. Although others have transcended him even there, he was the first in a new field, and shares with Cowper the honour of having led the reaction against the formalism which pervaded English poetry throughout the greater part of last century. Coleridge read his verses, and traced to their influence part of his own inspiration, when Wordsworth was unknown, and Southey had only written a single epic. It is unfair to estimate an author who strikes on a fresh vein of thought by comparison with his successors who have wrought it more perfectly, and Bowles is entitled to precedence in order of time among the more recent poets of nature in England. There are some of his sonnets, as "St. Michael's Mount," "Dover Cliffs," "Netley Abbey," "The Bells, Ostend," to which we still recur with pleasure. "The Monody at Matlock," "Coombe-Ellen," "Hope," and "The Messiah," are excellent specimens of meditative verse. Still higher, perhaps, are the lines addressed to "Chantrey's Sleeping Children." He equally wants passion and power; his dramatic attempts are unsuccessful, and his long poems, as the "Spirit of Discovery" and the "Missionary," are only redeemed from tediousness by passages of fine description. His verse has that smooth flow and cadence which is best suited to convey pensive thought and the impressions of the picturesque. Where he tries to "awake a louder and loftier strain," he fails; but he is a master of gentle music. Bowles is known among antiquarians by his "Parochial History of Bremhill," 1828; "Hermes Britannicus," and the "Life of Bishop Ken." Among critics, by the famous controversy arising out of his edition of Pope, published in 1807, when the severity of his strictures on the great satirist brought upon their author the animadversion of Byron, Campbell, and the Quarterly Review. "Impar congressus," Bowles conducted the warfare with considerable spirit, and with the more show of success from the fact, that many of the arguments of his opponents were unconsciously directed against the main conditions of their own celebrity.—J. N.
BOWMAN, John Eddower, an English naturalist, was born at Nantwich in Cheshire on 30th October, 1785, and died on 4th December, 1841. In early life he was confined to business, but he contrived to gratify a taste for botany. He became a manager of a bank at Welch Pool, and in 1824 became partner in a banking establishment at Wrexham. From this he retired in 1830, and did not again return to business. In 1837 he went to reside in Manchester, and there passed the remainder of his life. He became a fellow of the Linnæan Society in 1828. To that society's Transactions he contributed papers on a new Fungus, and on the parasitic nature of Lathræa squamaria. He has also written "On the longevity of the Yew," "On the Silurian rocks of North Wales," "On the origin of Coal," "On fossil trees discovered on the line of the Bolton Railway," "On the natural terraces on the Eildon Hills," and on the question of the existence of glaciers in North Wales.—J. H. B.
* BOWRING, Sir John, Knight, LL.D., F.R.S., is the eldest son of the late Charles Bowring, Esq. of Larkbear, near Exeter (whose ancestors had for many generations been engaged in the woollen trade of Devon), and was born at Exeter on the 17th October, 1792. "He learned English," says one of his biographers, "without precisely knowing how or when." Some slight tincture of the classics he received from a dissenting minister at Moreton Hampstead; of mathematics, from the master of the presbyterian charity school at Exeter; in which city he attended, too, the lectures of the well-known unitarian, Dr. Lant Carpenter, receiving from them, no doubt, an early and decisive bias. French he learned from a refugee priest; otherwise, his wonderful knowledge of modern languages was acquired "without a master." Himself desirous of being a preacher, he was placed by his friends, at the age of fifteen, in the office of a merchant at Exeter, where he continued for three years, laying the foundation, at odd hours, of his solid and extensive linguistic acquirements. Colloquial Italian he picked up from the vagrant venders and repairers of barometers; Spanish and German, Portuguese and Dutch, were added to French and Italian, partly through conversation with old merchants of Exeter, whose libraries of foreign books were placed at his disposal; the young
