Author: Rolleston, Matthew
Biography:
ROLLESTON, Matthew (1787-1817: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 2 Jul. 1817 and baptised at Southampton Independent (Dissenting) on 18 Aug., the sixth of seven children of Samuel Rolleston (1743-1823) and his wife Eliza Carr (1747-1801), who had married in Bath in 1773. His father had been a London hop-merchant and partner in the firm of Ridgeway and Rolleston but around 1774 moved to Upton Park House, Old Alresford, Hampshire, and later became J.P. and Deputy-Lieutenant for the County. Rolleston went to Midhurst Grammar School, Sussex, where John Wooll, Joseph Warton’s former pupil at Winchester and later biographer, was master. In his final year there he wrote The Anti-Corsican (1805), a clever attack on Napoleon. He went up to University College Oxford in 1805 (BA 1808, MA 1811, Fellow 1809, Bursar and Tutor 1813, Select Preacher 1815), where he also won the Newdigate Prize for English Verse with Moses (1807) and Mahomet (1808), both reaching a wider audience when they were reprinted in the Poetical Register 1810-1811 (1814). Shelley attended his lectures on logic (and probably divinity). He died on 22 Jul. 1817 at his elder brother Samuel’s home in Cowes, Isle of Wight, and was buried at St. Mary’s, Southampton. There is a memorial in marble to him by John Flaxman in the antechamber to the Chapel at University College. (ancestry.co.uk6 Jul. 2012; Shelley, Letters [1964] 1: 53; Oxford University and City Herald 26 Jul. 1817, 19 Jul. 1823; GM Jul. 1817, 92) AA