The last book (xvii.) treats of theology or (as we should now say)
mythology, and winds up with an account of the Holy Scriptures
and of the Fathers, from Ignatius and Dionysius the Areopagite to
Jerome and Gregory the Great, and even of later writers from Isidore
and Bede, through Alcuin, Lanfranc and Anselm, down to Bernard
of Clairvaux and the brethren of St Victor.
As the fifteenth book of the Speculum Doctrinale is a summary of the Speculum Naturale, so the Speculum Historiale may be regarded as the expansion of the last book of the same work. It consists of thirty-one books divided into 3793 chapters. The first book opens with the mysteries of God and the angels, and then passes on to the works of the six days and the creation of man. It includes dissertations on the various vices and virtues, the different arts and sciences, and carries down the history of the world to the sojourn in Egypt. The next eleven books (ii.-xii.) conduct us through sacred and secular history down to the triumph of Christianity under Constantine. The story of Barlaam and Josaphat occupies a great part of book xv.; and book xvi. gives an account of Daniel's nine kingdoms, in which account Vincent differs from his professed authority, Sigebert of Gembloux, by reckoning England as the fourth instead of the fifth. In the chapters devoted to the origines of Britain he relies on the Brutus legend, but cannot carry his catalogue of British or English kings further than 735, where he honestly confesses that his authorities fail him. Seven more books bring us to the rise of Mahomet (xxiii.) and the days of Charlemagne (xxiv.). Vincent's Charlemagne is a curious medley of the great emperor of history and the champion of romance. He is at once the gigantic eater of Turpin, the huge warrior eight feet high, who could lift the armed knight standing on his open hand to a level with his head, the crusading conqueror of Jerusalem in days before the crusades, and yet with all this the temperate drinker and admirer of St Augustine, as his character had filtered down through various channels from the historical pages of Einhard. Book xxv. includes the first crusade, and in the course of book xxix., which contains an account of the Tatars, the author enters on what is almost contemporary history, winding up in book xxxi. with a short narrative of the crusade of St Louis in 1250. One remarkable feature of the Speculum Historiale is Vincent's constant habit of devoting several chapters to selections from the writings of each great author, whether secular or profane, as he mentions him in the course of his work. The extracts from Cicero and Ovid, Origen and St John, Chrysostom, Augustine and Jerome are but specimens of a useful custom which reaches its culminating point in book xxviii., which is devoted entirely to the writings of St Bernard. One main fault of the Speculum Historiale is the unduly large space devoted to miracles. Four of the medieval historians from whom he quotes most frequently are Sigebert of Gembloux, Hugh of Fleury, Helinand of Froidmont, and William of Malmesbury, whom he uses for Continental as well as for English history.
Vincent has thus hardly any claim to be reckoned as an original writer. But it is difficult to speak too highly of his immense industry in collecting, classifying and arranging these three huge volumes of 80 books and 9885 chapters. The undertaking to combine all human knowledge into a single whole was in itself a colossal one and could only have been born in a mind of no mean order. Indeed more than six centuries passed before the idea was again resuscitated; and even then it required a group of brilliant Frenchmen to do what the old Dominican had carried out unaided. The number of writers quoted by Vincent is almost incredible: in the Speculum Naturale alone no less than 350 distinct works are cited, and to these must be added at least 100 more for the other two Specula. His reading ranges from Arabian philosophers and naturalists to Aristotle, Eusebius, Cicero, Seneca, Julius Caesar (whom he calls Julius Celsus), and even the Jew, Peter Alphonso. But Hebrew, Arabic and Greek he seems to have known solely through one or other of the popular Latin versions. He admits that his quotations are not always exact, but asserts that this was the fault of careless copyists.
A list of Vincent's works, both MS. and printed, will be found in the Histoire littéraire de France, vol. xviii., and in Jacques Échard's Scriptores ordinis praedicatorum (1719-21). The Tractatus consolatorius pro morte amici and the Liber de eruditione filiorum regalium (dedicated to Queen Margaret) were printed at Basel in December 1480. The Liber de Institutione Principum, a treatise on the duties of kings and their functionaries, has never yet been printed, and the only MS. copy the writer of this article has been able to consult does not contain in its prologue all the information which Échard seems to imply is to be found there. The so-called first edition of the Speculum Majus, including the Speculum Morale, ascribed to Johann Mentelin and long celebrated as the earliest work printed at Strassburg, has lately been challenged as being only an earlier edition of Vincent's three genuine Specula (c. 1468-70), with which has been bound up the Speculum Morale first printed by Mentelin (c. 1473-76). The edition most frequently quoted is that by the Jesuits (4 vols., Douai, 1624).
See J. B. Bourgeat, Études sur Vincent de Beauvais, théologien, philosophe, encyclopédiste (Paris, 1856); E. Boutaric, Examen des sources du Speculum historiale de Vincent de Beauvais (Paris, 1863), and in tome xvii. of the Revue des questions historiques (Paris, 1875); W. Wattenbach, Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen, vol. ii. (1894); B. Hauréau, Notices . . . de MSS. latins de la Bibliothèque Nationale, tome v. (1892); and E. Mâle, L'art relieieux du XIIIe siècle en France. (T. A. A.)
VINCENT, GEORGE (1796-1831?), English landscape and marine painter, was born at Norwich in June 1796. He studied art under “Old” Crome, and the age of fifteen began to contribute to the Norwich exhibition. From 1814 till 1823 he exhibited occasionally at the Royal Academy, and also in the Water-Colour Exhibition and the British Institution. In 1819 he removed from Norwich to London, and he was a contributor to the Suffolk Street gallery from its foundation in 1824 till 1830. He possessed great artistic abilities; but he fell into dissipation, and his works became slight and hastily executed. Finally he dropped out of sight, and he is believed to have died about 1831. His most important work, a “View of Greenwich Hospital,” was shown in the International Exhibition of 1862. His “London from the Surrey Side of Waterloo Bridge” is also a fine work.
VINCENT, MARY ANN (1818-1887), American actress, was born in Portsmouth, England, on the 18th of September 1818, the daughter of an Irishman named Farlin. Left an orphan at an early age, she turned to the stage, making her first appearance in 1834 as Lucy in The Review, at Cowes, Isle of Wight. The next year she married J. R. Vincent (d. 1850), an actor, with whom she toured England and Ireland for several years. In 1846 Mrs J. R. Vincent went to America to join the stock company of the old National theatre in Boston. Here she became a great favourite. No actress in America, except Mrs Gilbert, has ever been such “a dear old lady” to so wise a circle of constant admirers. She died in Boston on the 4th of September 1887. Her memory is honoured by the Vincent Memorial Hospital, founded in that city in 1890 by popular subscription, and formally opened on the 6th of April 1891, by Bishop Phillips Brooks, as a hospital for wage-earning women and girls.
VINCENT DE PAUL, ST (1576-1660), French divine, founder of the “Congregation of Priests of the Mission,” usually known as Lazarites (q.v.), was born on the 24th of April 1576 at Pouy, near Dax, in Gascogne, and was educated by the Franciscans at Dax and at Toulouse. He was ordained priest in 1600. Voyaging from Toulouse to Narbonne, he was captured by Barbary pirates, who took him to Tunis and sold him as a slave. He converted his third master, a renegade Italian, and escaped with him to Aigues-Mortes near Marseilles in June 1607. After short stays at Avignon and Rome, Vincent found his way to Paris, where he became favourably known to Monsieur (afterwards Cardinal) de Berulle, who was then founding the congregation of the French Oratory. At Berulle's instance he became curate of Clichy near Paris (1611); but this charge he soon exchanged for the post of tutor to the count of Joigny at Folleville, in the diocese of Amiens, where his success in dealing with the spiritual needs of the peasants led to the “missions” with which his name is associated. In 1617 he accepted the curacy of Chatillon-les-Dombes (or sur-Chalaronne), and here he received from the countess of Joigny the means by which he was enabled to found his first "“confrérie de charité,” an association of women who ministered to the poor and the sick. In 1619 Louis XIII. made him royal almoner of the galleys. Among the works of benevolence with which his name is associated are the establishment of a hospital for galley slaves at Marseilles, the institution of two establishments for foundlings at Paris, and the organization of the “Filles de la Charité,” to supplement the work of the confréries, whose members were mainly married women with domestic duties. He died at Paris on the 27th of September 1660, and was buried in the church of St Lazare. He was beatified by Benedict XIII. in 1729, and canonized by Clement XII. in 1737, his festival (duplex) being observed on the 19th of July. The Society of St Vincent de Paul was founded by Frederic Ozanam and others in 1833, in reply to a charge brought by some free-thinking contemporaries that the church no longer had the strength to inaugurate a practical enterprise. In a variety of ways it does a great deal of social service similar
