OpenLLM-France/wikimedia huggingface dataset:
# Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Campbell, John (1816-1855)

The date of birth should be 1807 (ODNB). 1904 Errata appended.
​CAMPBELL, Sir JOHN (1816–1855), general, only son of Lieutenant-general Sir Archibald Campbell of Ava (1769-1843) [q. v.], by Helen, daughter of John Macdonald, of Garth, co. Perth, was born on 14 April 1816. He entered the army as an ensign in the 38th regiment, which his father then commanded, in 1821, and joined it in India. He served as aide-de-camp to his father throughout the first Burmese war, and on 1 July 1824 he was promoted a lieutenant, without purchase, and in 1826 thanked by the governor-general in council for his services. On 11 July 1826 he was promoted to a company and remained in Burmah in a civil capacity till 1829, when he returned to England and joined the depôt of his ​regiment. From 1831 to 1837 Campbell acted as aide-de-camp to his father when lieutenant-governor of New Brunswick, and in the latter year he purchased the majority of his regiment. In 1840 he purchased the lieutenant-colonelcy of the 38th, and commanded it continuously in the Mediterranean, the West Indies, and Nova Scotia, until he was selected, as an ardent and successful regimental officer, for the command of a brigade in the expeditionary force intended for the East in 1854. In 1843 he had succeeded to the baronetcy, on 11 Nov. 1851 he had been promoted colonel by brevet, and on 24 March 1854 he was posted to the command of the 2nd brigade of the 3rd division under Major-general Sir Richard England, with the rank of brigadier-general. With that command he was present at the battles of the Alma and Inkerman, and on 12 Dec. 1854 he was promoted major-general. After the battle of Inkerman as the senior brigadier-general with the army, he was posted to the temporary command of the 4th division. On 7 June 1855 he was superseded by Lieutenant-general Bentinck, and on hearing of the intended assault upon the Great Redan he volunteered to lead the detachments of the 4th division to the attack. On 18 June he displayed 'a courage amounting to rashness,' and after sending away his aides-de-camp, Captain Hume and Captain Snodgrass, the latter the son of the historian of his father's war, he rushed out of the trenches with a few followers, and fell at once in the act of cheering on his men. Had he survived, Campbell would have been rewarded for his services in the winter, for in the 'Gazette' of 5 July it was announced that he would have been made a K.C.B. He was buried on Cathcart's Hill. He married, 21 July 1841, Helen Margaret, daughter of Colonel John Crowe. His eldest son, Archibald Ava, became third baronet.
H. M. S.
Dictionary of National Biography, Errata (1904), p.51 N.B.— f.e. stands for from end and l.l. for last line
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# Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Campbell, Neil (d.1627)

​CAMPBELL, NEIL (d. 1627), bishop of Argyll, was parson at Kilmartin and chanter of the diocese in 1574. He was a member of the assembly in 1590, and one of the assessors appointed by the moderator. In 1606 he was promoted to the bishopric of Argyll, but held it for only two years, resigning it in favour of his son in 1608. He had a very high reputation personally and as a pastor, and when other bishops were lampooned he alone was not. 'Solus in Ergadiis præsul meritissimus oris.' He was a member of the assembly 8 June 1610, having continued to discharge his duties as pastor. He died in 1627. Two of his sons were promoted to bishoprics, John to Argyll and Neil to the Isles.
[Keith's Scottish Bishops, p. 290; Hew Scott's Fasti, iii. 11.]
T. F. H.
Dictionary of National Biography, Errata (1904), p.51 N.B.— f.e. stands for from end and l.l. for last line
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# Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Campbell, Patrick

​CAMPBELL, Sir PATRICK (1773–1841), vice-admiral, was a son of Colonel John Campbell of Melfort in Argyllshire, and elder brother of Lieutenant-general Sir Colin Campbell (1776–1847) [q. v.] He was made lieutenant 25 Sept. 1794, and commander 4 Sept. 1797. In 1799 he was appointed to the Dart sloop, a vessel of an experimental character, designed by Sir Samuel Bentham, and carrying a very remarkable and formidable armament, of thirty 32-pounder carronades. On the night of 7 July 1800 the Dart, with two gun-brigs and four fireships in company, was sent into Dunkirk, to attempt the destruction of four large French frigates. The Dart ran close alongside of one, the Désirée ​of 38 guns, fired a double-shotted broadside into her, carried her by boarding, and brought her out over the shoals. The other frigates succeeded in evading the fireships by running themselves ashore, and were afloat again the next day; but the capture of the 38-gun frigate was a tangible witness of the success, which seemed the more brilliant as the Dart was rated as a sloop, and the extraordinary nature of her armament was not generally known. The achievement won for Campbell his post rank, 11 July, and his immediate appointment to the Ariadne frigate. In September 1803 he was appointed to the Doris, which on 12 Jan. 1805 struck on a rock in Quiberon Bay, and had to be abandoned and burnt a few days later, the officers and men being received on board the Tonnant of 80 guns, commanded by Captain W. H. Jervis. On joining the admiral off Brest, 26 Jan., the boat in which the two captains were going on board the flagship was swamped; Captain Jervis was drowned, but Campbell was fortunately rescued.
In 1807 and following years Campbell commanded the Unité frigate in the Adriatic, and in 1811 was moved into the Leviathan of 74 guns, also in the Mediterranean. He was nominated a C.B. at the peace, but had no further service till 1824, when he commanded the Ganges on the home station. In March 1827 he commissioned the Ocean for the Mediterranean, but manning a ship was at that time a work of many months, and he had not joined the fleet when the battle of Navarino was fought. The Ocean was paid off in the spring of 1830, and on 22 July Campbell attained the rank of rear-admiral. From 1834 to 1837 he was commander-in-chief at the Cape of Good Hope, with his flag in the Thalia frigate. He was made a K.C.B. on 12 April 1836, became a vice-admiral 28 June 1838, and died 13 Oct. 1841. He married in 1825 Margaret, daughter of Captain Andrew Wauchope of Niddrie, by whom he had two sons: the elder, Patrick John, now (August 1886) major-general in R.H.A.; the younger, Colin, as a lieutenant in the navy, commanded the Opossum gunboat in China 1857–1859, was captain of the Bombay when she was burnt at Monte Video, 14 Dec. 1864, and died at sea on board of the Ariadne in 1869.
J. K. L.
# Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Dennis, James Blatch Piggott

​DENNIS, JAMES BLATCH PIGGOTT (1816–1861), histologist, son of Philip Piggott Dennis, an officer in the army, took the degree of B.A. at Queen's College, Oxford, and was ordained in 1839. He is best known by his microscopical investigations into the internal structure of bone, of which he gave an account in the papers published in the ‘Journal of Microscopical Science.’ He is credited with having established two important geological facts, namely the existence of mammifers anterior to the lias deposit, and the existence of birds during the deposition of the Stonesfield slate, or further back by many formations than had been previously known (Journ. Microsc. Sci. iv. 261, v. 63, 191). The results of his researches were welcomed by men of high scientific rank, such as Professor Owen and Professor Henslow, and on the proposal of Owen he was elected a member of the Geological Society. The mammal jawbone which Dennis had discovered fourteen years previously in the Stonesfield slate formed the subject of a paper which Owen read before this society (Geol. Soc. Journ. xiii. 1–11). In connection with Dennis's discovery of the Stonesfield slate it is related that the curator of one of the university museums having sent some perfect bones to Professor Owen, and a few minute fragments of the same parcel to Dennis, the two investigators, without communicating with each other, both arrived at the same conclusion and ascribed the bones to the same fossil reptile. In 1860 Dennis read a paper before the British Association ‘On the Mode of Flight of the Sterodactyles of the Coprolite bed near Cambridge’ (Brit. Assoc. Rep. 1860, p. 76). Besides contributing papers to the ‘Journal of Microscopical Science’ and other serials, Dennis was the author of various pamphlets on theological and scientific subjects. He died on 13 Jan. 1861 at Bury St. Edmunds.
R. H.
# Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Denny, William

Died 1676 in the ODNB.
​DENNY, Sir WILLIAM (fl. 1653), who was created a baronet by Charles I 3 June 1642, was the author of a treatise entitled ‘Pelecanicidium, or the Christian adviser against self-murder,’ London, 1651, in prose and verse; and of a pastoral poem, ‘The Shepheards Holiday,’ written in 1653, but not published till 1870 in Huth's ‘Inedited Poetical Miscellanies.’ Denny also contributed commendatory verses to Stuart's ‘Rhoden and Iris,’ 1631, to ‘Annales Dubrenses,’ 1635, and to Benlowes' ‘Theophila,’ 1652. In 1654 it was proposed by the royalists to grant Denny the governorship of Yarmouth (Clarendon, State Papers, iii. 248). He married Catherine Young, and died in great poverty, apparently before the Restoration.
T. C.
# Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Dennis, Thomas

Thomas Denys in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
​DENNIS or DENYS, Sir THOMAS (1480?–1561), sheriff of Devonshire, was born at Holcombe Burnell, near Exeter, about 1480. He is said to have been a ‘domestic servant’ of Henry VII, privy councillor of Henry VIII, chancellor of Anne of Cleves, custos rotulorum of Devon, seven (or nine) times sheriff of the county between 1508 and 1556, and recorder of Exeter from 1514 to 1544. He was M.P. for Devonshire in 1529 and 1533. While sheriff in 1531 he received a writ for the burning of Thomas Bennet, a friend of Bilney, who had posted placards in Exeter declaring the pope to be Antichrist. He ordered a stake to be set up in Southernhay, within the jurisdiction of the city, but the Exeter ‘chamber’ resisted this as an infringement of their privileges, and he had to burn his heretic outside their boundary in Livery-dole. There in after days he founded an almshouse for twelve aged men, which, Hoker suggests, may have been intended as an atonement for the part he took in carrying out the sentence of the law. In 1541 he received a grant of St. Nicolas's priory, Exeter (Monasticon, iii. 376). He endeavoured to pacify the Devonshire insurgents in 1549, and was active in suppressing the rising. When in 1554 Sir Peter Carew [q. v.] called on the citizens of Exeter to petition against the marriage of Mary and Philip of Spain, ‘as a first step towards a rising,’ Dennis took command of the city, and put it in a state of defence. He arrested some of the party of the Carews, but connived at the escape of Sir Peter. He is said to have been about eighty at his death, 18 Feb. 1560–1, and accordingly to have lived in the reigns of eight English sovereigns. By his wife Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Angel Dun of London, he had a son, Sir Robert Dennis, whose eldest son, Sir Thomas, was knighted by the Earl of Leicester in the Low Countries in 1586, married Anne, daughter of William Paulet, marquis of Winchester, and died in 1602. The grandson and grandfather are sometimes confused together (Maclean, Sir Peter Carew, p. 49 n.).
W. H.
# Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Denny, Henry

​DENNY, HENRY (1803–1871), entomologist, was for forty-five years curator of the museum of the Literary and Philosophical Society in Leeds. Before his appointment he had published at Norwich in 1825 a monograph on the British species of the genus Pselaphus of Herbst. The peculiar direction thus given to his studies was followed for the rest of his life, and Denny, while duly performing his modest duties of curator, made himself a leading authority on the subject of the parasitic insects which infest man and beast. He was the first salaried curator of the Leeds Museum, and thoroughly identified himself with the interests of that institution. The well-known entomologist Kirby, to whom Denny dedicated his first monograph, endeavoured to secure for the latter employment on a serial publication projected by him for the illustration, by means of coloured plates, of his ‘Introduction to Entomology.’ The negotiations with the publishers on this subject, however, came to ​naught. The British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1842 made a grant to Denny of fifty guineas for the purpose of assisting him in the study of British Anoplura.
Denny died at Leeds on 7 March 1871, at the age of sixty-eight, and a fund amounting to 883l. was raised by subscription for the benefit of his widow and younger children. His published writings are: 1. ‘Monographia Pselaphorum et Scydmænorum Britanniæ; or an Essay on the British species of the genera Pselaphus of Herbst, and Scydmænus of Latreille,’ Norwich, 1825, 8vo. 2. ‘Monographia Anoplurorum Britanniæ; or an Essay on the British species of Parasitic Insects belonging to the order Anoplura of Leach,’ London, 1842, 8vo.
R. H.
# Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Blair, William (1741-1782)

​BLAIR, WILLIAM (1741–1782), captain in the royal navy, was the son of Daniel Blair of Edinburgh, collaterally related to the Blairs of Balthayock. He became a lieutenant in the navy on 9 Oct. 1760, but did not attain his commander’s rank till 6 Dec. 1777. He was posted on 18 April 1778, and commanded the Dolphin, of 44 guns, in the stubborn battle on the Doggerbank, 5 Aug. 1781. Notwithstanding her small force, the exigencies of the case compelled the Dolphin to take her place in the line of battle. Blair's conduct was worthy of the distinction thrust upon him, and won for him the special approval of the admiralty, and his appointment to the Anson, a new 64-gun ship, then fitting for service in the West Indies. In the January following Blair sailed in company with Sir George Rodney, and on 12 April, when the French were completely defeated to leeward of Dominica, the Anson was in the leading squadron under the immediate command of Rear-admiral ​ Drake, and was warmly engaged from the very beginning of the battle. Her loss was not especially great in point of numbers, but one of her killed was Captain Blair. A monument to his memory, jointly with his brother officers, Captains Bayne and Lord Robert Manners, was erected in Westminster Abbey at the public expense.
[Beatson's Memoirs, v. 405, 475, 479; Gent. Mag.(l782), lii. 331; News and Queries, 6th ser. vii. 122.]
J. K. L.
# Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Blak, John

John Black in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
​BLAK or BLACK, JOHN (d. 1563), a Dominican friar of Aberdeen, wrote ‘De reali præsentia Christi in Sacramento Altaris;’ ‘Acta colloquii cum Willoxio symmysta;’ ‘Conciones piæ;’ and ‘Monita ad Apostatas.’ His public disputation with John Willox took place in Edinburgh in the summer of 1501. Bishop Lesley gives the three heads of their disputation, and adds that in the end nothing was agreed. Indeed it would seem that the only important result of such discussions was to exasperate the temper of the people, for Blak was stoned to death by a protestant mob in Edinburgh on 7 Jan. 1562–3.
[Camerarius, De Scot. Fort. p. 202; Collections for the Shire of Aberdeen and Banff (Spalding Club, 1843), i. 202; Lesley's History of Scotland (Bannatyne Club, 1830), p. 295; Sir James Balfour’s Annals (1824), i. 325; Wodrow’s Blog. Collections, i. 110; Dempster's Hist. Eccles. Gent. Scot. (1627), p. 85; Tanner's Bild. Brit. p. 104.]
T. F. H.
# Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Blake, Charles

1904 Errata appended.
​BLAKE, CHARLES, D.D. (1664–1730), divine and poet, was born at Reading, Berkshire, being the son of John Blake, ‘gent.,’ of that town, and educated at the Merchant Taylors’ School and St. John’s College, Oxford, of which he was scholar and afterwards fellow (B.A. 1683, M.A. 1687–8, D.D. 1696). He was domestic chaplain to Sir William Dawes, afterwards bishop of Chester and archbishop of York, who was his close friend. Among his preferments were the rectory of St. Sepulchre’s, London, of Wheldlake in Yorkshire, and of St. Mary's, Hull, and he was successively a prebendary of Chester, a prebendary of York (1716), and archdeacon of York (1720), He died 22 Nov. 1730. He published a small collection of Latin verses, consisting of a translation into Latin of the poem of Musæus on Hero and Leander, and of part of the fifth book of Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost;’ and two original poems, one called ‘Hibernia Plorans,’ written in 1689, the year of the siege of Londonderry, deploring Ireland's woes, in the style of Virgil's Eclogues, and the other an elegy on the death, in 1688, of Frederick, the Great Elector of Brandenburg. These were all published together in a little sixpenny pamphlet, under the title of ‘Lusus Amatorius, sive Musæi de Herone et Leandro carmen; cui accedunt Tres Nugæ Poeticæ,’ at London in 1693.
[Wood's Athenæ Oxonienses; Lists, &c. of Scholars of the Merchant Taylors' School, ed. Hessy; Robinson’s Register of Merchant Taylors' School, i. 296; Allen's History of Yorkshire; Ormerod's History of Cheshire]
R. B.
Dictionary of National Biography, Errata (1904), p.29 N.B.— f.e. stands for from end and l.l. for last line
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# Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Blair, John (fl.1300)

Non-existent, according to the ODNB.
​BLAIR, JOHN (fl. 1300), chaplain of Sir William Wallace, was a native of Fife, and is said to have been educated at Dundee in the same school with Wallace. After continuing his studies at the university of Paris he entered holy orders, and under the name of Arnoldus became a monk of the order of St. Benedict at Dunfermline. When Wallace became governor of the kingdom, Blair was appointed his chaplain. According to Henry the Minstrel, Blair, along with Thomas Gray, parson of Liberian, ‘oft one, oft both,’ accompanied Wallace in almost all ‘his travels,’ and one or the other kept a record of his achievements. From these notes Blair ‘compiled in dyte the Latin book of Wallace life,’ from which Henry the Minstrel professed to derive the principal materials for his poem on the ‘Acts and Deeds of Sir William Wallace.’ The work of Blair is supposed to have been written in 1327. A professed fragment of it from a manuscript in the Cottonian Library was published with notes by Sir Robert Sibbald in 1705 under the title ‘Relationes quædam Arnoldi Blair Monachi de Dumfermelem et Capellani D. Gulielmi Wallas militis,’ 1327, and was also reprinted along with the poem of Henry the Minstrel in 1758. These so-called ‘Relationes’ are, however, nothing more than a plagiarism from the ‘Scotichronicon.’ He is said to have been also the author of a work entitled ‘De liberata tyrannide Scotia,' which is now lost.
[The Acts and Deeds of Sir William Wallace, by Henry the Minstrel, especially Book V., chap. i, lines 525–50; Dempster’s Hist. Eccl. Scot. Gent. (1627), p. 86; Mackenzie’s Writers of the Scots Nation, i. 247–8, 264; Ross’s Scottish History and Literature (1884), p. 60.]
T. F. H.
# Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Blair, Patrick

​BLAIR, PATRICK, M.D. (fl. 1728), botanist and surgeon, was born at Dundee, where he practised as a doctor, and in 1706 dissected and mounted the bones of an elephant which had died in the neighbourhood, and of which he contributed a description, under the title of 'Osteographia Elephantina,' to the Royal Society of London, published in 1713. Being a nonjuror and Jacobite, he was imprisoned as a suspect in 1715. He subsequently removed to London, and delivered some discourses before the Royal Society on the sexes of flowers. But he soon settled at Boston, Lincolnshire, where he published 'Miscellaneous Observations on the Practice of Physick, Anatomy, and Surgery' in 1718, 'Botanick Essays' in 1720, and 'Pharmaco-botanologia' in 1723-8, which closed with the letter H, it is presumed through his death. His ' Botanick Essays ' formed his most valuable work. In them he clearly expounded the progress of the classification of plants up to his time, and the then new views as to the sexual characters of flowering plants, which he confirmed by his own observations.
[Pulteney's Progress of Botany in England, 1790, ii. 134-140; Chalmers's Biog. Dict.]
G. T. B.
# Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Children, George

​CHILDREN, GEORGE (1742–1818), electrician, born in 1742, graduated B.A. of Oriel College, Oxford, in 1762, and was a bencher of the Middle Temple, although he never practised at the bar. He owned much property near Tunbridge, and successfully engaged in business there as a banker for many years, devoting his leisure to scientific pursuits. He lived at Ferox Hall, Tunbridge, and married the eldest daughter of Thomas Marshall Jordan, by whom he had an only son [see Children, John George]. In 1802 the news of the discovery of the galvanic pile by Professor Volta in Italy reached this country. It was at once seen that by enlarging the dimensions of the apparatus employed more powerful effects could be produced. Children and his son became much interested in the subject. His position enabled him to retire from the active exercise of his business, and he devoted all his energies and much of his money to aiding his son in the construction of new and large galvanic batteries. Their principal battery consisted of twenty-one cells, each containing plates of copper and zinc, having a combined area equal to thirty-two square feet. When these plates were properly connected and immersed in acidulated water, they generated a current of electricity which was capable of producing effects considered at that time very surprising. The refractory metals, iridium and platinum, were easily fused by this current, which was able to ignite six feet of thin platinum wire. Children also wrote much verse, and extracts were published in the memoir of his son. In 1816 the failure of the Tunbridge bank, of which he was still a partner, left Children nearly penniless. His son took a small house at Chelsea for him, and there he died on 21 Aug. 1818.
[Gent. Mag. 1818, pt. ii. p. 378; Memoir of J. G. Children, 1853.]
W. J. H.
# Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Chillenden, Edmund

​CHILLENDEN, EDMUND (fl. 1656), theological writer, was an officer in the parliamentary army. At the general rendezvous held before Fairfax in Corkbush Field, Hertford, on 15 Nov. 1647, Major Scott, having insinuated seditious principles of the soldiery, was committed to the custody of Lieutenant Chillenden, and sent up to the parliament. Subsequently Chillenden attained the rank of captain. He was living in 1656.
He published: 1. 'Preaching without Ordination,' London, 1647, 4to. Lazarus Seaman wrote a brief answer to this work, appended to his 'Vindication of the Judgment of the Reformed Churches and Protestant Divines from Misrepresentations concerning Ordination and Laying on of Hands,' London 1647, 4to. Another reply appeared under the title of 'Church Members set in Joynt, by Filodexter Transilvanus,' London, 1648, 4to. 2. 'Nathan's Parable; with a Letter to his Excellency the Lord General Cromwell, London, 1653, 4to.
T. C.