of booksellers in London and Westminster, with silly commendations of some, and stupid abuse of others.’ Of one he says:
Nature's most choice productions are his care,
And them t'obtain no expence or pains does spare.
A character so amiable and bright
Inspires the mind with rapture and delight,
The gentleman and tradesman both in him unite.
[Biog. Dram.; Nichols's Illustr. iii. 641; Gent. Mag. xxxvi. 241; Genest's Hist. of the Stage, iv. 470, x. 178.]
DELL, JONAS (d. 1665), quaker, who died at Stepney, and who is frequently referred to in the polemical writings of his time as ‘the quaking soldier,’ was at one time a soldier in the parliamentary army. Before he joined the Society of Friends in 1657 or 1658 he was a puritan. He wrote: 1. ‘Christ held forth by the Word, the onely way to the Father; or a Treatise discovering to all the difference betweene Lawes, Bondage, and the Gospel's Liberty,’ 1646. 2. ‘Forms the Pillars of Anti-Christ; but Christ in Spirit the True Teacher of His People; and not Tradition. … Written in Scotland in opposition to some people who do imitate John the Baptist by dipping themselves in water,’ &c., 1656. 3. ‘A Voyce from the Temple,’ 1658. This alone was written after he became a quaker.
[Records of the Soc. of Friends at Devonshire House, Bishopsgate; Smith's Cat. of Friends' Books.]
DELL, WILLIAM (d. 1664), master of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, was originally a member of Emmanuel College, in the same university, and fellow of that society. He proceeded B.A. 1627–8, M.A. 1631. Soon after (or possibly before) taking his master's degree he was appointed secretary to Archbishop Laud; we find Laud writing (29 Sept. 1631) to Viscount Dorchester for the purpose of conveying the royal mandate ‘for a grant in reversion to Robert Reade and William Dell, gentlemen of the office of his majesty's signet, to be held by them to the only use and behoof of one Thomas Windebank’ (Laud, Works, Ang.-Cath. Lib., vii. 42). Laud's petition to the House of Lords is described by Prynne as ‘written with Mr. Dell's hand, and subscribed with his own’ (Canterburie's Doome, p. 44).
Subsequently, but under what influences does not appear, Dell abandoned the tenets of the church of England and became, by reputation at least, an antinomian. He attended Fairfax as a ‘preacher of the army’ in the campaign of 1645–6, from the battle of Naseby to the siege of Oxford; and was the officiating minister at the marriage of General Ireton and Bridget Cromwell, which took place at Holton in Oxfordshire on 15 Jan. 1646, Holton being at that time the headquarters of Fairfax's army. On 7 June 1646 he preached before Fairfax and the officers at Marston a sermon entitled ‘The Building and the Glory of the truly Spiritual and Christian Church;’ this he printed and published in the following year, and from it we derive some facts in his personal history. He represents himself as having been exposed to most unsparing attacks from those who disliked his doctrine. His position, so far as it is discernible, was already of that character which seems to have earned for him so much severe censure from writers of very different schools throughout his later career. He aimed, apparently, at a kind of eclecticism, for he refuses to ‘allow any such distinction of christians as presbyterians and independents, this being only a distinction of man's making, tending to the division of the church.’ This sermon may be looked upon as giving the keynote of his peculiar doctrinal teaching. On 25 Nov. following he preached before the House of Commons on Hebrews ix. 10. His discourse was printed under the title, ‘Right Reformation; or the Reformation of the Church of the New Testament represented in Gospel Light.’ In 1719 this sermon was reprinted with an anonymous dedication to Bishop Hoadly, in which it is described as especially relevant to the celebrated Bangorian controversy, and as an exposition of the views of ‘one who not only taught the very same doctrines which your lordship now teaches, but defended them with the very same arguments with which your lordship has defended them.’
Cole says that ‘on the surrender of the garrison at Oxford,’ Dell, ‘among others of his tribe, was sent down there to poison the principles of that university; and on the morning of the martyrdom of King Charles, he, with other bold and insolent fanatical ministers, went with all the solemnity becoming a better cause, and all the confidence and assurance peculiar to the fanatical tribe, to offer their unhallowed services to the blessed martyr, whom they had just brought to the scaffold’ (Addit. MS. 5834, p. 271).
On 15 April 1649 Dr. Batchcroft was ejected from the mastership of Caius College, and on 4 May following, on the petition of the fellows of the society, Dell was appointed by parliament to succeed him. During his tenure of the office (which lasted to 11 May
