it was proposed that he should accompany Lord Buckhurst in May to Abbeville, to conclude a truce between S ain and the United Provinces, and he was spoken of again fora like errand in October; but he did not consent to go, and the last attempt to draw him back to office was ma/de as late as January 1604-5, when, under a fresh sovereign, the second Cecil, the lord treasurer, pressed him to become secretary of state, but could not prevail. Sir Thomas, for such he had become by King James's knighting him soon after his accession, was then busied with that greater work which made the closing years of his life eclipse all that had gone before.
It was on 23 Feb. 1597-8 that he wrote his formal letter to the vice-chancellor at Oxford, offering to restore to its former use that room which was all that then remained of the old public library, to which Duke Humphrey of Gloucester had been a chief benefactor. But for some time before, when resolving to keep, as be himself says, ‘out of the throng of court contentions.' he had been considering how he could still best ‘ do the true part of a profitable member of the state,' and had concluded at last ‘to set up my stall' at the library door in Oxon . . . which then in every part lay mined and waste.’ His offer was gratefully accepted by the university, and only a fortnight afterwards Dudley Carleton writes (in one of his gossipping letters preserved in the State Paper Office) that the proposal met with great favour amongst Bodley’s countrymen of Devonshire, ‘ and every man hethinks himself how by some good book or other he may be written in the scroll of the benefactors.' We see by this how eamestly at once Bodley began to solicit help from his ‘great store of honourable friends' And the help came abundantly in the kind he most needed. As to money he had ‘some purse-ability to go through with the charge,' although in but one year’s time Carleton writes that the library had already cost him much more money than he expected, ‘because the timber works of the house were rotten, and had to be new made.' But books poured in from donors in all arts of England and abroad for some time. Bodley employed Bill, a London bookseller, to travel on the continent as his agent for purchases there ; while at home, in 1610, the Stationers’ company agreed to give a copy of every book which they published. This indefatigable industry which he displayed in the prosecution of his work, and the attention to matters of minute detail, as well as to the broad principles on which his library should be based (betokening one practised in schools of careful forethought and business habits), are largely shown in his draft of statutes and in his letters to his first librarian, Thomas James, which were published by Hearne in 1703 under the title of ‘Reliquiæ Bodleianæ.' The library was solemnly opened with full formality on 8 Nov. 1603, and in 1604 King James I granted letters patent, styling the library by Bodley‘s name (a distinction well deserved for him who had now founded the first practically public library in Europe; the second, that of Angelo Rocca at Rome, being opened only in this same year 1604), and giving license for the holding of lands in mortmain. In the following year the king himself visited the library, with a full appreciation alike of the founder and the foundation, and repeated his visit in 1614. The first catalogue, a small but thick qnarto volume of (655 pages, appeared in 1605, when already the old fifteenth-century room was beginning to be found too small; and consequently five years later the addition of an eastern wing was commenced, which was completed in 1612. In 1Gll Bodley began the permanent endowment of the library by attaching to it a farm in Berkshire and some houses in the city of London; the former is still the property of the library, but the latter were sold in 1853. After 1611 Bod1ey's health was failing fast. He had long been afflicted with the stone,aud complicated disorders (ague, dropsy, &c.) are spoken of as being now superadded. And so after a lingering decay e died at his London house on 28 Jan. 1612-3 (a year and a half after the death of his wife), aged, as he says in his will dated 2 Jan., ‘67 complete and more. ‘Having no children he made the university his chief heir, provoking, however, thereby sharp, and in some measnrejust, censure from his contemporaries for his neglect of relatives and friends. John Chamberlain, a friend to whom nothing was bequeathed, speaks with great bitterness in letters to Sir R. Winwood and Sir Dudley Carleton on the subject, saying ‘he was so carried away with the vanity an vainglory of his library that he forgat all other respects and duties almost' (Winwood, Memorials, iii. 429; Cal. Dom. Stale Papers, 1611-18, p. 169). But the will is full of legacies to his relatives, servants, and others, although probably not in the proportion that was expected. To his brothers, Laurence [q.v.] and Sir Josies [q.v.], bequests were made in money and houses. The four sons of his deceased brother Miles and the children of his sisters Prothasy Sparry, Alce Carter, and Sybill Culverwell, and his wife’s children by her first husband, are all remembered. But one sister is altogether ignored, who had offended her brothers by eloping with a poor minister named John
