Men of the Time, eleventh edition/Blakesley, Joseph Williams
BLAKESLEY, The Very Rev. Joseph Williams, B.D., the son of a London merchant, was born in 1808, and educated at St. Paul's School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated B.A. in 1831 as 21st Wrangler and Senior Chancellor's Medallist. He was subsequently elected Fellow and Tutor of his college, and twice appointed select preacher before the university, in which capacity he preached the two courses of sermons on the Dispensation of Paganism and the Evidences of Christianity, published under the title "Conciones Academicæ." In 1845 he was presented by his college to the vicarage of Ware. He was an unsuccessful candidate for the Regius Professorship of Divinity at Cambridge in 1850; was offered, but declined, the Regius Professorship of Modern History in 1860; was appointed a classical examiner in the University of London in 1861; and was presented by the Crown to a canonry in Canterbury Cathedral in 1863; after which he sat as Proctor for the Chapter of Canterbury in the Lower House of Convocation, and was named one of the Committee for revising the authorised version of the New Testament. In June, 1872, he was appointed Dean of Lincoln, and on the death of Bishop Thirlwall, was appointed by the Crown as his successor in the Senate of the University of London. Dean Blakesley, the reputed "Hertfordshire Incumbent" of the Times, has published "The Life of Aristotle, with a Critical Examination of some questions of Literary History," 1839; an edition of Herodotus in the "Bibliotheca Classica," 1854; "Four Months in Algeria, with a Visit to Carthage," 1859; and has been a contributor to several of the principal reviews.