Wedgwood Volunteers.' The last eight or nine years of Wedgwood's short life were an incessant struggle with disease. He died at Eastbury, Dorset, on 10 July 1805.
Perhaps the most striking tribute to Wedgwood is that of Sydney Smith when he said that he knew 'no man who appears to have made such an impression on his friends,' and his friends included many of the leading men of intellect of the day. He gave Wordsworth 'an impression of sublimity.' Thomas Campbell speaks of him as a 'strange and wonderful being … full of goodness, benevolence … a man of wonderful talents, a tact of taste acute beyond description.' His opinions were to Sir Humphry Davy as 'a secret treasure,' and often, he said, enabled him to think rightly when perhaps otherwise he would have thought wrongly. Thomas Poole wrote of Wedgwood that he 'was a man who mixed sublime and comprehensive views of general systems with an acuteness of search into the minutioe of the details of each beyond any person he ever met with.'
As to Coleridge's praises we may perhaps be tempted to discount them, though he declared, evidently alluding to the annuity, that Wedgwood was not 'less the benefactor of his intellect.' It is, however, to be regretted that the 'full portrait of his friend's mind and character,' written by Coleridge, is lost, and also that Sir James Mackintosh never carried out his intention of publishing Wedgwood's speculations, and at the same time of showing 'how bright a philosophical genius went out when the life of that feeble body was extinguished.'
Wedgwood's only writings are two papers on the 'Production of Light from different Bodies by Heat and by Attrition,' read before the Royal Society in 1791 and 1792, in which we find the earliest suggestion of the general law, since established, that all bodies become red hot at the same temperature. They are remarkable as indicating a considerable power of research when he was only twenty years of age.
[Phil. Trans. Royal Soc. 1792; Meteyard's Group of Englishmen; Meteyard's Life of Josiah Wedgwood; Campbell's Life of 8. T. Coleridge; Sandford's Thomas Poole and his Friends; Paris's Life of Davy; Beattie'a Life and Letters of Thomas Campbell; Coleridge's Friend, 1850, i. 190; information kindly given by R. B. Litchfield, esq.]
WEEDALL, HENRY (1788–1859), president of St. Mary's College, Oscott, born in London on 6 Sept. 1788, was son of a medical practitioner who had been at Douay College with John Milner [q. v.], bishop of Castabala. At the age of six years he was sent to the school at Sedgley Park, and there he remained for nine years and a half. Being destined for the priesthood, he continued his course at St. Mary's College, Oscott, and was ordained priest by Bishop Milner at Wolverhampton on 6 April 1814. He taught classics in the college for some years, and in 1818 he became its vice-president and professor of theology. Afterwards he was appointed acting president of the college, and he became absolute president in 1826. He was also chosen a canon of the English chapter, and made vicar-general to Bishop Thomas Walsh, vicar-apostolic of the midland district. He was created D.D. by Leo XII in January 1829. During his presidency the new buildings at Oscott were erected, and his name is intimately associated with that college and seminary, where he spent more than forty years of his life.
In 1840 he was nominated bishop of Abydos in partibus, and vicar-apostolic of the new northern district of England, but he went to Rome and obtained a release from the appointment. In June 1843 he took charge of the mission at Leamington. Being called to St. Chad's, Birmingham, he was made vicar-general and dean of the cathedral. Soon afterwards he retired to the convent at Handsworth, near Birmingham. He was appointed provost of Birmingham, and he assisted at the first council of Westminster. In July 1853 he was reinstated as president of Oscott College, and on 9 May 1854 he was named by Pius IX a monsignor of the second rank, as domestic prelate of his Holiness, being thus entitled to the style of ‘right reverend.’ He died at Oscott on 7 Nov. 1859. His funeral sermon, preached by Dr. (afterwards Cardinal) Newman, was published under the title of ‘The Tree beside the Waters.’
Weedall was distinguished by his eloquence as a preacher. He was diminutive in stature, and suffered from ill-health throughout his life.
He was the author of:
- An edition of the ‘Douay Latin Grammar,’ 1821.
- ‘The Origin, Object, and Influence of Ecclesiastical Seminaries considered. … To which is added a short discourse explaining the Doctrine and Meaning of the Catholic Church in consecrating Bells,’ Birmingham, 1838, 8vo.
He also published several funeral sermons and addresses.
