Laudator Temporis Acti

David Norton, "Bois, John (1561-1644)," Oxford Dictionary of National Biography:

By five John Bois had read his Bible through, by six he could write Hebrew, and he learnt Greek.

[....]

Bois thought of studying medicine but, imagining he had every disease of which he read, gave it up. Yet his constitution was strong. He often walked the 20 miles from college to his mother's house for dinner, reading as he walked if he fell in with tedious company. Throughout his life he was careful of his health. He picked and rubbed his teeth so assiduously that, in his biographer Anthony Walker's phrase, 'he carried to his grave almost an Hebrew alphabet of teeth' (Allen, 147), that is, about two-thirds of his teeth. He ate only dinner and supper, with nothing in between except occasional aqua vitae and sugar for wind, and would allow an hour or more for digestion, either sitting or walking. Following three precepts for health from William Whittaker, a master of St John's for whom he wrote a funeral oration, he always studied standing, never studied in a window, and never went to bed with cold feet.

If health was a fetish, study was a passion. Bois frequently worked from four in the morning until eight at night in the university library; even in old age he studied eight hours a day.

[....]

Taking nothing but his Bible into the pulpit, his ambition was always to be understood by all. Although he published nothing of his own, he remained a scholar and a teacher. At Boxworth he established a weekly study circle with eleven or twelve other ministers. He usually kept a scholar to help with his children's education and that of the poorer local children, and he took in children of gentlemen as boarders and students.

Bois's lasting claim to fame is that he alone of the men who worked on the King James Bible made notes on some of the discussions. Though some of the Cambridge fellows were jealous, thinking they needed no help from the country, Bois was appointed in 1604 to the second Cambridge company to work on the Apocrypha.

[....]

Bois was always a note taker and maker. After hearing a sermon, for instance, he would note the date, text, and preacher and much of the content. His notes of the discussions have the same qualities and are personal memoranda on nearly 500 points in the epistles and Revelation: the text at issue is recorded and the discussion of it summarized with occasional references to his own views if they differed from those of his colleagues. They reveal the highly scholarly nature of discussions which characteristically focused on the meaning of the original. His interest is always in the problem rather than the eventual solution adopted for the English of the 1611 Bible.

Hat tip: Kevin Muse.