352 Memoir of the Rev. Leonard Blomefield. 



His Life and Work. 



Mr Blomefield (whose patronymic was Jenyns) was born in 

 London 25th May 1800, so that he was in his ninety-fourth 

 3'ear, his father being the Eev. George Leonard Jenyns, a 

 Canon of Ely and a magistrate for Cambridgeshire, in which 

 county he was a large landowner, and his mother a daughter 

 of Dr Heberden, a leading physician of that day. After being 

 privately educated at Putney, he went to Eton in 1813, where 

 he had as schoolfellows the Earl of Carlisle (afterwards Lord 

 Lieutenant of Ireland), and the famous Dr Pusey and his 

 brother. Sir John Davis, the diplomatist, who died near 

 Bristol a few years ago, at an advanced age, went to the same 

 school at Putney, as also did Professor Maiden, who filled the 

 Greek Chair in University College, London. From Eton Mr 

 Blomefield went to St. John's College, Cambridge, in 1818, 

 taking his degree four years later. In 1823 he took orders, 

 being ordained deacon by Bishop Pelham of Exeter, in old 

 Marylebone Church, London, and priest a year afterwards in 

 Christ's College, Cambridge, by Bishop Kaye of Lincoln, who 

 was then head of the House. His first curacy was that of 

 Swaffham Bulbeck, in Cambridgeshire, a parish of about 700 

 in population, adjoining his father's property, and the vicar, 

 who was non-resident, resigning five years afterwards, the 

 Bishop of Ely gave him the living, which he held for thirty 

 years, and only resigned on account of his wife's health. This 

 lady, who was the eldest daughter of the Rev. A. E. Daubeny, 

 vicar of the Ampneys, Gloucestershire, brother of Dr Charles 

 Daubeny, the well-known Oxford Professor, died after he had 

 settled in Bath in 1860, and two years later he married the 

 eldest daughter of the Rev. Robert Hawthorn, vicar of 

 Stapleford, Cambridge, who survives him. 



His choice of the Church as a profession was the fulfilment of 

 youthful ambition, and though he will be remembered rather as 

 a man of science than as a student of divinity and a parish 

 priest, his clerical labours extended over a third of his long 

 life, and were marked by the same earnestness and thoroughness 

 which characterised his scientific pursuits. On the Sunday 

 following his ordination, at the age of 23, he began work by 

 taking two Sunday services, and he was the first resident 

 clergyman the people of his parish had ever known. Hence it 



