ROLLE or ROLLS, SAMUEL (fl. 1657–1678), divine, born in London, was admitted a scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge, on 24 April 1646, became a minor fellow on 28 Sept. 1647, and was appointed ‘sublector tertius’ in 1650. He took orders, and in August 1657 was minister of Isleworth, Middlesex, and weekly lecturer at Hounslow chapel. He was afterwards beneficed at Dunton, Buckinghamshire. At the Restoration he pronounced against the ‘prodigious impiety of murdering’ the king, but he was ejected from Dunton by the Act of Uniformity, 1662. He afterwards preached in divers places, asserting that but for ‘an impediment,’ known to the archbishop, he would have worked within the church. He was admitted doctor of physic at Cambridge, by the king's letter mandatory, on 27 Oct. 1675. He then publicly disavowed anything in his signed or anonymous writings contrary to the principles acknowledged by the church of England and the university of Cambridge. About 1678 he was appointed chaplain in ordinary to the king, but mainly devoted himself to writing religious books. He was living in 1678.
He published:
- ‘The Burning of London commemorated and improved in CX Discourses,’ &c., London, 1667, 8vo; in four parts, with titles and separate pagination.
- ‘London's Resurrection, or the Rebuilding of London,’ London, 1668, 8vo.
- ‘A Sober Answer to the Friendly Debate betwixt a Conformist and a Nonconformist, written by way of a Letter to the Author’ (Simon Patrick [q. v.], bishop of Ely), 3rd edit. 1669, published under the name of Philagathus.
- ‘Justification Justified, or the great Doctrine of Justification stated,’ in opposition to William Sherlock, London, 1674.
- ‘Loyalty and Peace, or Two Seasonable Discourses,’ London, 1678, 8vo.
[Wood's Athenæ Oxon. ed. Bliss, iv. 106, 108; Palmer's Nonconformist's Memorial, i. 298; Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1657–8, pp. 81, 264; Lipscomb's Hist. of Buckinghamshire, iii. 343; Cooper's Annals of Cambridge, iii. 570; Owen's Works, ed. Goold, 1851, ii. 276; Orme's Life of Owen, p. 380; Notes and Queries, 2nd ser. ii. 88, 139; Sylvester's Reliquiæ Baxterianæ, iii. 13; notes kindly furnished by W. Aldis Wright, esq. Rolls has been confounded with a Dr. Daniel Rolles, whose funeral sermon by Daniel Burgess [q. v.] was published, London, 1692, dedicated to his widow Alice.]
ROLLESTON, GEORGE (1829–1881), Linacre professor of anatomy and physiology at Oxford, was second son of George Rolleston, squire and vicar of Maltby, a village near Rotherham in the West Riding of Yorkshire. He was born at Maltby Hall on 30 July 1829. He received his early education from his father to such good effect that he was able to read Homer at sight by the time he was ten years old, and he was accustomed to say that he could then think in Greek. He was sent to the grammar school at Gainsborough in 1839, and two years later to the collegiate school at Sheffield, at that time under the mastership of Dr. George Andrew Jacob. At the age of seventeen he won an open scholarship at Pembroke College, Oxford, and matriculated on 8 Dec. 1846, though he did not come into residence until the following term. He worked hard during his undergraduate career, and obtained a first class in classics at the final examination for the B.A. degree in Michaelmas term 1850. The college elected him on 27 June 1851 to a fellowship established in 1846 by Mrs. Sheppard for the promotion of the study of law and physic. This fellowship he held until his marriage in 1862, when he was elected an honorary fellow of the society.
His election to the Sheppard fellowship appears to have determined Rolleston to follow the profession of medicine. In October 1851 he entered as a student at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London, living in Dyer's Buildings, Thavies Inn. He worked as zealously at the hospital as he had done at the university, and he came under the influence of two remarkable leaders then attached to the school as physician and surgeon respectively, Sir George Burrows and Sir William Lawrence [q. v.] He proceeded M.A. at Oxford in 1853, and, having qualified in due course as M.B. in 1854, he was admitted a doctor of physic in 1857. He was admitted a member of the Royal College of Physicians of London in 1856, and a fellow in 1859.
Rolleston was appointed one of the physicians to the British civil hospital at Smyrna in 1855, towards the close of the Crimean war, and in that capacity he had charge of surgical as well as of medical cases. Later in the year he went to Sebastopol, but soon returned to Smyrna, where his work was so highly appreciated that he and three other civil practitioners were retained when the rest of the staff were sent home on the closure of the civil hospital at the end of the campaign. The four doctors were directed to compile a report upon the sanitary and other aspects of Smyrna. This report, containing much local information of great value, was completed before November 1856. Rolleston, after making a tour in Palestine, returned to England in June 1857.
