Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 15.djvu/256

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Arle Court, near Cheltenham. He married Mary, daughter of Sir Richard Blake, who survived him, dying in 1728, and had one son, Fleetwood, who died 21 June 1726, aged 30, to his father's inconsolable grief, and four daughters, of whom one married Lord Fortescue of Credan, and another John Parkhurst of Catesby, Northamptonshire.

[Foss's Lives of the Judges; Luttrell's Diary; State Trials, vii. 967, 1188; Raymond's Reports, 1260, 1420; Atkyns's Gloucestershire, 174; Lipscomb's Buckinghamshire.]

J. A. H.

DORNFORD, JOSEPH (1794–1868), rector of Plymtree, Devonshire, born 9 Jan. 1794, was the son of Josiah Dornford of Deptford, Kent, and the half-brother of Josiah Dornford, miscellaneous writer [q. v.] His mother, Mrs. Thomason, was a Cambridge lady who has been described (Mozley, Reminiscences, chap. lxxviii.) as the chief lady friend of the evangelical leader, Charles Simeon [q. v.], and as pouring out the tea for his weekly gatherings. Dornford entered young at Trinity College, Cambridge, which in 1811 he suddenly left to serve as a volunteer in the Peninsular war. Mozley says: ‘He would rather fly to the ends of the earth and seek the company of cannibals or wild beasts than be bound to a life of tea and twaddle.’ He saw some service, and on his return home he entered at Wadham College, Oxford, where he proceeded B.A. in 1816. In 1817 he was elected to a Michel fellowship at Queen's, and in 1819 to a fellowship at Oriel, where he graduated M.A. 1820. In that year he joined Dr. Hamel on the well-known ascent of Mont Blanc in which three guides were killed. He was successively elected tutor, dean, and proctor of his college. Succeeding Keble in the tutorship, ‘Keble's pupils felt it a sad let down. … Yet they who came after, as I did, found Dornford a good lecturer, up to his work, ready, precise, and incisive’ (ib.) In 1832 he was presented by his college to the rectory of Plymtree, and in 1844 he was collated by Bishop Phillpotts honorary of Exeter Cathedral. He published nothing save a few sermons. One of these, on ‘The Christian Sacraments,’ is contained in a volume edited by the Rev. Alexander Watson, ‘Sermons for Sundays, Festivals, and Fasts, and other Liturgical Occasions, contributed by bishops and other clergy of the church’ (1845). In his bearing Dornford was more of a soldier than a priest, and his talk ran much on war. He was a man of strong will, generous impulses, and pugnacious temper. He died at Plymtree on 18 Jan. 1868, aged 74.

[Gent. Mag. 1868, p. 391; Mozley's Reminiscences, chiefly of Oriel College and the Oxford Movement, chaps. lxxviii. lxxix. and lxxx.]

J. M. S.

DORNFORD, JOSIAH (1764–1797), miscellaneous writer, born in 1764, was son of Josiah Dornford of Deptford, Kent, a member of the court of common council of the city of London, and the author of several pamphlets on the affairs of that corporation and the reform of debtors' prisons. He studied at Trinity College, Oxford—B.A. 1785, M.A. 1792—and at Göttingen, where he took the degree of LL.D. He was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn. In 1790 he published in three volumes an English version of John Stephen Pütter's ‘Historical Development of the Present Political Constitution of the Germanic Empire;’ the translation was probably executed at Göttingen, where Pütter was professor of laws. He also published in Latin a small volume of academic exercises by another Göttingen professor, the philologist Heyne, who, in a preface to this publication, speaks of Dornford as a ‘learned youth’ who had ‘gained the highest honours in jurisprudence in our academy.’ His only other known work is ‘The Motives and Consequences of the Present War impartially considered’ (1793), a pamphlet written in defence of the Pitt administration. In 1795 he was named inspector-general of the army accounts in the Leeward Islands, and the record of this appointment shows that he had served as one of the commissaries to Lord Moira's army. He died at Martinique 1 July 1797.

[Gent. Mag. 1795, p. 973; 1797, p. 800. In Brit. Mus. Cat. and in Watt's Bibl. Brit. Dornford is confused with his father.]

J. M. S.

DORRELL, WILLIAM. [See Darrell, William, 1654–1721.]

DORRINGTON, THEOPHILUS (d. 1715), controversialist, the son of nonconformist parents, was educated for the ministry. In 1678 he conducted, with three other young nonconformist ministers, the evening lecture at a coffee-house in Exchange Alley, London, which was attended by many of the wealthiest merchants in the city. He afterwards saw fit to desert the dissenters, and ‘in a most ungenerous manner wrote against his former friends’ (Wilson, Dissenting Churches, iii. 447). On 13 June 1680 he entered himself on the physic line at Leyden (Peacock, Index of Leyden Students, Index Soc., p. 29). In 1698 he travelled in Holland and Germany, and afterwards published some account of his wanderings. His piety, not to say bigotry, commended him to the notice of Williams, bishop of Chichester, by whom he was en-