Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 56.djvu/428

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Sexby, and may well have helped him in composing it.

Wood also attributes to Titus ‘A seasonable speech made by a member of parliament in the House of Commons concerning the other House in March 1659,’ reprinted in Morgan's ‘Phœnix Britannicus,’ 1732, p. 167. In this case the attribution is probably correct, though it was assigned many years later to Anthony Ashley Cooper, first earl of Shaftesbury [q. v.] (Christie, Life of Shaftesbury, i. app. iv.).

[Wood's Athenæ Oxonienses, ed. Bliss, iv. 623; Clutterbuck's Hertfordshire, i. 342–5; Kingston's Civil War in Hertfordshire, 1894, p. 124; Hillier's Charles I in the Isle of Wight, 1852. The letters of Charles I to Titus, and other documents printed by Hillier, are in the British Museum, Egerton MS. 1533.]

C. H. F.

TOBIAS (d. 726), bishop of Rochester, is said to have been a native of Kent and to have been educated at Dover and Canterbury. He ‘was one of the scholarly ecclesiastics who had been trained in the great school at Canterbury’ (Bright, Chapters of Early Church History, 1897, p. 429). There he was a pupil of Theodore and Hadrian, and Bede describes him as ‘a man of multifarious learning in the Latin, Greek, and Saxon tongues’ (Hist. Eccles. v. 8, 23). He was consecrated ninth bishop of Rochester by Brihtwald in succession to Gebmund, who died probably in 696. The first genuine charter attested by him is dated 706; he was present at the council of Clovesho in 716, when King Wihtred promulgated his law against the alienation of church property (Bright, pp. 430–1). He died in 726 and was buried in St. Paul's Church in St. Andrew's Cathedral at Rochester (Thorpe, Reg. Roffense, p. 5; Shindler, Registers of Rochester, p. 64). Bale ascribes to him a book of homilies and Pits a book of letters; neither is known to be extant.

[Authorities cited; Leland's Collectanea; Bale's Scriptt. 1559, p. 90; Pits, p. 124; Baronius's Annales Eccl. 1762, xii. 364; Wilkins's Concilia; Fabricius's Bibl. Lat. Medii Ævi, vi. 768–9; Tanner's Bibl. Brit.-Hib.; Wharton's Anglia Sacra, i. 330; Bernard's Cat. MSS. Angliæ, i. 241; Le Neve's Fasti, ed. Hardy; Wright's Biogr. Literaria, i. 242; Haddan and Stubbs's Councils; Bishop Stubbs in Dict. Christian Biogr.]

A. F. P.

TOBIN, GEORGE (1768–1838), rear-admiral, second son of James Tobin of Nevis in the West Indies, and elder brother of John Tobin [q. v.], was born at Salisbury on 13 Dec. 1768. He entered the navy in 1780 on board the Namur, in which he afterwards went out to the West Indies and was present in the action of 12 April 1782. After the peace he was for some time in the Bombay Castle, guardship at Plymouth, in the Leander on the Halifax station, in the Assistance; and from 1788 to 1790 he made a voyage in a ship of the East India Company. On his return he was borne for a few weeks in the Tremendous during the Spanish armament, and on 22 Nov. he was made a lieutenant. During 1791–3 he was in the Providence with Captain William Bligh [q. v.] in the voyage to Tahiti and the West Indies, and on his return to England learned that by his absence he had escaped (as he then considered it) being appointed third lieutenant of the Agamemnon with Captain Horatio (afterwards Viscount) Nelson [q. v.], who, through his wife, was connected with Tobin's family. It seemed to him a much better thing to be appointed second lieutenant of the Thetis frigate with Captain Alexander Cochrane [q. v.] In the Thetis he remained. Some four years later, 12 July 1797, Nelson wrote: ‘The time is past for doing anything for him. Had he been with me, he would long since have been a captain, and I should have liked it, as being most exceedingly pleased with him.’

Tobin was not made a commander till 12 July 1798. He was advanced to the rank of captain in the large promotion at the peace, 29 April 1802, and in September 1804 was appointed to the Northumberland, flagship of his old chief, Cochrane, off Ferrol and afterwards in the West Indies; in September 1805 he was moved into the Princess Charlotte, a 38-gun frigate, and in her, off Tobago, captured the French corvette Cyane after a very gallant resistance. After much convoy service Tobin, still in the same frigate (renamed Andromache in 1812), co-operated during 1813–14 with the army in the north of Spain and the west of France. In July 1814 the Andromache was paid off, and Tobin had no further service at sea. On 8 Dec. 1815 he was nominated a C.B., became a rear-admiral on 10 Jan. 1837, and died at Teignmouth on 10 April 1838. He married, in 1804, Dorothy, daughter of Captain Gordon Skelly of the navy, widow of Major William Duff of the 26th regiment, and by her had issue one son and one daughter.

[Marshall's Roy. Nav. Biogr. iv. (vol. ii. pt. ii.) 629; United Service Journal, June 1838; Gent. Mag. 1838, ii. 100.]

J. K. L.

TOBIN, JOHN (1770–1804), dramatist, author of ‘The Honey Moon,’ born at Salisbury on 28 Jan. 1770, was the son of James Tobin, a merchant, and his wife, born Webbe,