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VINCENT, WILLIAM, D.D. 



VINCENT, WILLIAM, D.D. 



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theology, and appointed Vincent de Paul its president. In this 

 capacity, he took an active part in the religious controversies of that 

 period, and warmly espoused the cause of the Jesuits against the 

 followers of Jansenius. Through his influence, a letter signed by eighty- 

 eight bishops was sent to the reigning pontiff, praying him authorita- 

 tively to condemn the witness of Jausenius, and in particular the 

 work entitled ' Augustinus.' In carrying on this controversy however 

 he appears not to have exceeded the bounds of moderation, and to 

 have employed against his adversaries only the legitimate weapons of 

 argument and expostulation. The last four years of his life were spent 

 under the burden of infirmities, which compelled him to keep within 

 the precincts of the convent of St. Lazarus, where nevertheless he con- 

 tinued efficiently to preside over the interests of the community he 

 had established. His death, which occurred on the 27th of September 

 1660, was preceded by severe and protracted sufferings, which were 

 borne with his accustomed patience and resignation. His remains 

 were deposited in the church of St. Lazarus, in presence of the 

 assembled clergy and the highest dignitaries of the capital, who 

 mourned his loss as that of their spiritual father; but perhaps the 

 tears of most genuine affection were shed on his tomb by the 

 multitude of the poor and needy, who gratefully remembered that 

 they had often been consoled by his counsels and relieved by his 

 charity. 



The panegyric of this eminent minister of the church has been 

 written by two of its most distinguished prelates, Boulogne, bishop 

 of Troyes, and the Cardinal Maury ; the last of these has been greatly 

 admired for the beauty of its style and the energy of its expressions ; 

 it may be seen in the last edition of his ' Essai sur 1'Eloquence de la 

 Chaire.' The memory of Vincent de Paul was consecrated by a cere- 

 mony, known in the church of Rome by the name of Beatification, by 

 Benedict XIII., on the 14th of August 1729, and he was canonised as 

 a saint on the 16th of June, 1737, by Clement XII., who appointed 

 19th July as the day of his festival in the Roman calendar. 



The name of St. Vincent de Paul stands deservedly high in the list 

 of benefactors of mankind. His entire life was devoted to the ad- 

 vancement of the best interests of humanity ; he was a constant actor 

 on the ever recurring scene of sickness and suffering, poverty and 

 crime, and his presence was always attended by consolation and relief 

 to their victims. Men of all creeds and persuasions have rendered 

 homage to his worth, and the members of his own church have ascribed 

 to his relics the power of working miracles. The greatest miracle 

 however was himself, and the mighty works of which he was the 

 instrument : the many hospitals which he founded, the religious com- 

 munities which he established, the missionaries whom he sent abroad, 

 the vast sums of money which he caused to be disti'ibuted to the poor 

 and sick, his untiring activity in ministering to their wants, his dis- 

 interestedness and self-devotion, his evangelical patience and religious 

 resignation ; above all, his genuine humility, which, while it shed lustre 

 on those of his charitable deeds which are known, has caused a large 

 proportion of them to be unknown and unwritten, save in the 

 records of the book of life ; these, it must be allowed by all, are the 

 real miracles on which stands the fame of this apostolical man. 



The following is a list of the writings he has left : 1, ' Regulse seu 

 Constitutiones communes Congregationes Missionis/ Paris, 1658 ; 2, 

 ' Lettre au Pape Alexandre VII., pour solliciter la Canonization de 

 Fra^ois de Sales, priuce-e'veque de Geneve;' 3, ' Conferences spiri- 

 tuelles pour 1'Explication des Regies des Sceurs de la Charite,' Paris, 

 8vo, 1826. 



The two most important biographies of St. Vincent de Paul are 

 those of Abelly (' Vie de St. Vincent de Paul,' Paris, 2 vols- 8vo, 1839), 

 who was intimately acquainted with him, and Collet (which has been 

 translated from the French by a Roman Catholic clergyman, Dublin, 

 1846), who was a member of his community; there is also a third, by 

 M. de Capefigue, Paris, 8vo, 1827. 



VINCENT, WILLIAM, D.D., was born 2nd November, 1739, in 

 the city of London, where his father carried on business, first as a 

 packer, afterwards as a Portugal merchant, till he lost all he had 

 through the failures that followed the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, in 

 which also his second son perished. William, who was his third, was 

 admitted a king's scholar of Westminster school in 1753, was thence 

 elected a scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1757, and in 1761 

 took his degree of B.A., and was chosen a Fellow of his college. The 

 next year he was appointed one of the ushers of Westminster school ; 

 in 1764 he took his degree of M.A. ; and in 1771, having passed 

 through the previous gradations, he rose to be second master of the 

 school on the resignation of Dr. Lloyd. The same year he was also 

 nominated one of the chaplains in ordinary to his majesty. Soon 

 after this he married Miss Hannah Wyatt. In 1776 he took his 

 degree of D.D. In 1778 he was presented by the Dean and Chapter of 

 Westminster to the vicarage of Longdon in Worcestershire ; but this 

 living he resigned, after having held it about half a year, on being col- 

 lated by the Archbishop of Canterbury to the united rectories of All- 

 hallows the Great and Less, in Thames street, London. At length, in 

 1788, on the death of Dr. Smith, Dr. Vincent succeeded him as 

 head-master of Westminster School. This situation he continued to 

 hold, discharging its duties with distinguished ability, till, on the 

 translation of Bishop Horsley from the see of Rochester to that of 

 St. Asaph. in 1802, he was nominated by the crown the bishop's suc- 



cessor in the deanery of Westminster, having already been presented 

 to a prebend in that church the year before. In 1803 the rectory of 

 St. John's, Westminster, which is in the gift of the dean and chapter, 

 having become vacant, and the nomination falling to his turn, he took 

 that living for himself and resigned Allhallows, which however he 

 obtained for his eldest son. Finally, in 1805, he exchanged St. John's 

 for the rectory of Islip in Oxfordshire, the patronage of which also 

 belongs to the church of Westminster. He died at his residence in 

 Westminster, on the 21st of December 1815. 



Dr. Vincent's first publication was an anonymous 'Letter to Dr. 

 Richard Wataon, Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge (after- 

 wards Bishop of Llandaff), occasioned by his Sermon preached before 

 the University,' 8vo, London, 1780. It was an attack upon certain 

 political principles announced in Watson's printed sermon. This was 

 followed by 'A Sermon preached at the Yearly Meeting of the Charity 

 Children at St. Paul's,' 4 to, 1784 : ' Considerations on Parochial Music,' 

 Svo, 1787; 'A Sermon preached at the Anniversary Meeting of the 

 Sous of the Clergy,' 4to, 1789 ; and ' A Sermon preached at St. Marga- 

 ret's, Westminster, for the Grey-coat School of the Parish,' Svo, 1792. 

 This last discourse, which was another proclamation and defence of its 

 author's strong conservative politics, was printed at the request of the 

 Association against Republicans and Levellers, by whom, it is said, above 

 twenty thousand copies of it were distributed. In 1793 Dr. Vincent 

 published a short Latin tract entitled ' De Legione Manliana, Quaestio 

 ex Livio desumpta,' &c., 4to. It is an explanation of what had 

 appeared to be an irreconcileable difference between the account of 

 the Roman legion given by Polybius (book vi., c. 1) and what is said 

 by Livy (book viii., c. 8) about a manoeuvre of the consul T. Manlius 

 in his battle with the Latins at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, A.U. 413. 

 His next publication, which appeared in 1794, was a tract in 8vo, 

 entitled ' The Origination of the Greek Verb, au Hypothesis.' Siugu- 

 larly enough, in the same week in which this performance issued from 

 the press in London, there appeared at Edinburgh a volume of a new 

 edition of the ' Encyclopaedia Britannica,' in which, in an article on 

 Philology, was given a view of the origination of the inflections of the 

 Greek verb almost identical with that proposed by Dr. Vincent. The 

 author of the Edinburgh article was David Doig, LL.D., a very remark- 

 able man, then master of the grammar-school of Stirling, where he 

 died at the age of eighty-one, in 1800. Vincent immediately bought 

 out Doig, and although, we believe, they never met, they became 

 friends through the medium of au epistolary correspondence. Vin- 

 cent's speculation extended and put into a new shape, was reproduced 

 the following year, 1795, under the title of 'The Greek Verb analyzed, 

 an Hypothesis.' 



In 1797 appeared, in a quarto volume, the first of the works which 

 have principally established Dr. Vincent's reputation, ' The Voyage of 

 Nearchus to the Euphrates, collected from the original journal pre- 

 served by Arrian.' [NEABCHUS.] This was followed in 1800 by 'The 

 Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, part first, containing an Account of 

 the Navigation of the Antients from the Sea of Suez to the Coast of 

 Zanguebar, with Dissertations.' The Second Part, containing the navi- 

 gation from the Gulf of ^Elana to the island of Ceylon, appeared in 

 1805; and both the Nearchus and Periplus were republished together, 

 in two volumes quarto, in 1807, under the title of ' The History of the 

 Commerce and Navigation of the Antieuts in the Indian Ocean.' A 

 Supplemental volume, containing the Greek text of the two voyages, 

 was afterwards added, with an English translation and also part of 

 Arrian's Indian History. This work forms one of the most important 

 contributions to ancient geography that modern scholarship has 

 produced. 



Dr. Vincent contributed several valuable articles to the ' Classical 

 Journal,' and he was also a frequent writer hi the ' British Critic ' till 

 near the close of his life. He printed, but did not publish, a letter in 

 French, addressed to M. Barbie' du Bocage, who had attacked his 

 ' Nearchus.' His only other separate publications were, ' A Defence of 

 Public Education, in a Letter to the Lord Bishop of Meath,' Svo, 

 1802 ; and 'A Sermon preached before the House of Commons on the 

 Day of General Thanksgiving for Peace,' 4to, the same year. The 

 ' Defence of Public Education,' which he wrote and published imme- 

 diately before terminating his connection with the Westminster 

 School, was an answer to certain attacks recently made on the system 

 of our public schools, which was charged with a neglect of religious 

 instruction. One of the principal authors of the attack was Dr. 

 O'Beirne, the prelate to whom Vincent addressed his ' Defence," which 

 passed rapidly through three editions. It is said to have been tho 

 only one of his publications from which he ever derived any pecuniary 

 profit ; he presented what he got from it to his wife as the first-fruits 

 of his authorship. It was to this publication also that he was indebted 

 for the deanery of Westminster, which was given him by Mr. Adding- 

 ton, then first lord of the treasury, avowedly as an expression of his 

 admiration of the Defence of Public Schools. When Vincent repub- 

 lished his Nearchus and the Periplus, in 1809, he dedicated the work 

 to his patron, then become Lord Sidmouth. 



By his wife, who died in 1807, Dr. Vincent had two sons, the Rev. 

 W. St. Andrew Vincent and George Giles Vincent, Esq. The history 

 of his life has been given at ample length by his friend Archdeacon 

 Nares, in a communication printed in the 26th and 27th Nos. of tho 

 ' Classical Journal.' 





