Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men Part 11

He seems to have aimed at the production of an "Alphabet of Characters," which should indicate the various sounds of the voice, and he succeeded. "I thought," he says, in the preface to his book, "and still think it, theoretically, a near approach to perfection.

Into this character I translated the whole of St. Matthew's Gospel, and various extracts from the _Psalms_ and other books." "With great reluctance, and not without much pain," he came to the conclusion that this system was impracticable, and he "therefore gave up the idea altogether of that character, and looked about for some other." It then occurred to him that the Roman alphabet "might be supplemented by certain marks, so as to represent all the elementary sounds;" and this resulted in his compiling an alphabet containing forty symbols, of which five--_ai_, _au_, _oi_, _ou_, and _oo_ are compounds; the remaining thirty-five are the ordinary letters, some of which have marks under them, like the dash we make under a word in writing to indicate greater force or emphasis, thus--U D Z o d z.

Having arrived at this point, he intimates his belief that his next discovery was the result of direct inspiration. "I am far from superst.i.tious, yet I must confess, with regard to this discovery, I have long felt as though I had been no more than a mere instrument, accomplis.h.i.+ng the will of Another; and that the direction of my thoughts, and my ultimate convictions, were only a part of the development of my own mind, enforced and controlled by some internal law, which ensured its own effects without any original exercise of my own reason. One thing is certain: I cannot tell how it was brought into my own i mind, and I have no recollection of the process which ultimately revealed to me a knowledge of the power and essential importance of the discovery."

The discovery of which he speaks is that the "success of the Philosophic [language] turned upon the proper use of two short vowels and three nasal consonants. These are the short _u_, as in faithful, and the _i_ in pin, and the consonants, _m_, _n_, and _n _ [_i.e._, _ng_]. One of these three consonants is to be found in the centre of every root of the [philosophic] language. They resemble the reed in the hautboy--they give B metallic ring in the words where they occur.

They may be compared to the sound of the trumpet in a concert; the other consonants are the sound of the drum--rub-a-dub-dub."

It is of course impossible, in a short notice like this, to give a thousandth part of the methods and arguments by which Mr. Edmonds works out his theory; but I shall attempt to make his process clear by one or two short examples.

He starts by a.s.suming that, as all words are reducible to nouns as a first principle, so the whole of the nouns can be cla.s.sified into forty "genera." These genera are each divisible into "differences,"

and the differences are sub-divisible into "species." He gives a list of the "genera," each of which is composed of two vowels and two consonants; and then, in a series of very elaborate tables, he proceeds to show how words of every possible signification can be built up from the materials thus provided and cla.s.sified. For instance, amongst the genera, _onji_ is the root-word for insects, _anji_ for fish, _enji_ for birds, and _inji_ for beasts. Taking _anji_--or fish--for my example, because it is the shortest, I may mention that he divides fish into nine "differences," two of viviparous, five of oviparous, one of crustacea, and one of scaly river fish. I will give one example of each cla.s.s, merely pointing out that the letters _anj_ occur in the middle of each name. The final letters give the _species_, and the initials the _specific fish_ indicated, thus: _Panjoo_ is whale, _Banjoi_ is skate, _Danjo_ is herring, _Kanja_ is gurnet, _Danji_ is sea-perch, _Danjai_ is eel, _Banjino_ is plaice, _Vanjoinoi_ is star-fish, and _Fanjino_ is salmon.

The same process of building up words from simple roots is carried on all through the whole range of thought and action; and the result as a whole is that, as a theoretical system, the entire subject is successfully worked out.

Whether it will ever be carried out in practice is extremely doubtful.

Some Spanish enthusiasts were so enraptured with Mr. Edmonds's book that they sought and obtained an interview with the late Emperor Napoleon, with a view to secure his patronage of the new scheme. The expression of his opinion was short, but shrewd. He said the only way to establish universal language was to first establish universal empire; and that, he thought, would not be possible just yet.

In July, 1867, Mr. Edmonds, when 79 years of age, married, at the Old Church, Leamington, as his second wife, Miss Mary Fairfax, of Barford, near Warwick, the descendant of a truly n.o.ble family. She was 75 years of age at the time. Their natures and dispositions, however, being so very dissimilar, this proved to be an unhappy union, and after living together three weeks only, they separated by mutual consent. His mind at this time--and, indeed, for some previous time--must have been giving way. Eventually, he was placed in the asylum at Winson Green.

From thence he was removed to a private asylum at Northampton, where he died in the year 1868, being 80 years of age.

His funeral at the General Cemetery was attended by most of the leading Liberals of the town, and by great crowds of admirers. Charles Vince, who was so soon to follow him, delivered a very eloquent address over the open grave, in which he said, "For the firmness with which he maintained his convictions, and for the zeal and ability with which he advocated them, he will always have a name and a place in the history of his native town, if not in the history of his country. To the honour of his memory it will be said that he held his opinions honestly; laboured for them diligently; devoted great gifts and rare energy to their promotion; and amply proved his sincerity, and won the crown of the conscientious, by the things that he suffered."

It is, in my opinion, not very creditable to the Liberal party in the town that George Edmonds has no public memorial. The generation pa.s.sing away may remember his face and figure; but before it goes, it has a duty to its successors to perform. That duty is to leave some lasting memorial, in the shape of a statue, bust, or portrait, of the man, who, sacrificing his own freedom, helped thereby to gain for his countrymen liberty of thought, liberty of speech, and liberty to carry on in the future the beneficent policy which he advocated with, so much eloquence and perseverance.

THE EARLY DAYS OF CHARLES VINCE.

With reverent pen and loving spirit, I sit down to write of one whose sunny smile brightened every circle upon which it shone; whose ma.s.sive intellect and clear mental vision discovered subtle truths and deep symbolic meanings in common things; whose winning and graphic eloquence made these truths and meanings clear to others, showing them that not a blade of gra.s.s springs by the roadside, nor an insect flutters for a day in the gladdening light of the spring-time, but has its lesson, if men will but search for it, of tender mercy and fatherly care. His broad and catholic spirit was wide enough to embrace within his friends.h.i.+p men of widely divergent thought and belief. His life was one long and eloquent lesson to us all. If ever man deserved the blessing following the words, "Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of the least of these, my brethren, ye did it unto me," that man was Charles Vince, for of him, more emphatically than can be said of most of us, it may be recorded that "he went about doing good."

It is not necessary to sketch the mature character of one so recently taken from amongst us. The shadow of his homely figure has scarcely faded from our streets, and the sound of his eloquent voice still seems to vibrate in our ears. It seems but yesterday that, on that cold and cheerless day, his lifeless but honoured remains were borne to the grave through the crowds of sympathising people who thronged the busy streets to see the last of him they knew so well and loved so heartily. Little could be added to the warm tributes that were paid so recently to the memory of the gifted, truthful, fearless, earnest, hard-working Christian teacher, who, in the prime of his life and the zenith of his powers, was removed from the sphere which he adorned by the purity of his character, and benefited by the power and graces of his intellect.

But these tributes referred mainly to what he was, and what he did, in the later part of his career, and in the maturity of his powers.

In some of them the references to his parentage, his birth, and his boyhood, were singularly inaccurate. In one periodical of large circulation and great influence, statements full of error and misrepresentation went forth to the world unchallenged. It is my purpose, therefore, in this paper, to correct the mistakes of those who wrote, being imperfectly informed; and to give, as I had it from the lips of his friends, his schoolfellows, and his relatives, a simple, but at all events a strictly accurate, record of the few and unromantic events of the early days of one who became so fruitful in goodness and in charity.

With the view that this little sketch should at least be free from serious error, I made, the other day, a special pilgrimage to Vince's birthplace--the pleasant town of Farnham in Surrey. I stood before the lowly cottage in which he first drew breath; I sat in the little room where his father and his mother taught him practical lessons of truthfulness and sympathy; I looked into the little plain deal cupboard his father made for him, in which he stored the books he loved so well and studied so intently. I talked with his schoolfellows and the companions of his boyish days, and listened to those who were the chosen friends of his youth-hood, and I noted the brightening of the eye, and the more fervid tones of the voice, as one after another told me of the budding intellect, and of the germination of the warm and tender spirit, of him they were all so proud of.

After a long continuance of cold and cheerless weather, the morning of Sat.u.r.day, the 26th of May, 1877, was bright and genial. An unclouded sun, and a warm south-western wind, awoke the birds to melody, and gave the flowers new fragrance. As the train bore me through pleasant Surrey, the fields not only smiled--they absolutely seemed to laugh with joy at the advent of the first day of summer, and when we stopped at the pretty station of plutocratic Surbiton, the air was laden with the perfume of lilacs and of hawthorn blossom. From a dense thicket, nearly overhead, came cheerfully the melodious notes of "the careful thrush," who, as Browning says--

"Sings his song thrice over, Lest I should think he never could recapture That first, fine, careless rapture."

As the train pa.s.ses on, I see, beyond the silvery Thames, the stately front of Hampton Court Palace. A little further on we pa.s.s Esher, where, on a tree-girt hill, the lofty pediment of Claremont peeps through the trees, and reminds me that here, sixty years ago, the hopes of England were quenched by the death of the youthful Princess Charlotte. Strange, that this house should have been the death-place of the unthroned heiress of England, and, forty years afterwards, of the dethroned crafty old French king, Louis Philippe.

When we stop at Woking Common, I feel at home. Here, half-a-century ago, when there was not even a hut on the spot which is now a busy town, I used to play as a boy. Yonder is the Basingstoke ca.n.a.l, where, with willow wand and line of string from village shop, I used to beguile the credulous gudgeon and the greedy perch. Just up that lane to the right, on the road to Knap Hill--famed the world over for its hundreds of acres of rhododendrons--is the nurseryman's shed to which, in the summer, cart-loads of the small, wild, black cherries came from Normandy, for seed. Here the boys of the neighbourhood had the privilege of gorging themselves gratis with the luscious fruit, on the simple condition that they placed the cherry-stones in bowls provided for the purpose. As the train moves on, we dash through a deep cutting of yellow-coloured sand, and emerge upon a wild and dreary region.

On the hills to the right are a gaol, a reformatory, and a lunatic asylum; and on the left is the "Necropolis," where London, in the black and sandy soil, deposits the myriads of its dead. All around, the ground is olive-coloured with unblossomed heath, bright and golden here and there with the flowerets of the p.r.i.c.kly gorse. Dense and dismal plantations of black-looking Scotch firs are enlivened at intervals by the delicate and tender green spikelets of a sprouting larch. On we rush for miles through this sombre region, through dank mora.s.ses, and past dark and gloomy pools, from one of which a heron rises majestically. On, until, in a broad and airy region, the red coats of soldiers are seen dotted here and there amongst the heather.

In the distance are the serried lines of the tents of Aldershot. Just beyond this point the train suddenly enters the chalk formation, and comes simultaneously into a cultivated district. A mile or two further, and the train stops at Farnham; birthplace of Toplady, who wrote the beautiful hymn, "Rock of Ages;" of William Cobbett, st.u.r.diest of English yeomen; and of Charles Vince, who, coming to Birmingham an utter stranger, so endeared himself to its people, that he was universally beloved; and when he died, was followed to his grave by thousands of the princ.i.p.al inhabitants, amid the tearful regrets of the entire population.

As I leave the station, and approach the town, I see on my left, nestling under a cliff, an old timbered house, bearing on its front the inscription, "Cobbett's birthplace." It is an inn, and I enter in search of refreshment. A somewhat surly man appears, and tells me that he "ain't got no cold meat." I persevere, and am told that I _can_ have some bread and cheese, which are accordingly served. I ask the landlord--for such the man is--if there are any relics of Cobbett remaining in the house? The reply is, "not as I knows on." I am told, however, that he is buried in the churchyard hard by, and that his grave is "right agen the front door," and this is all the man knew, or cared to tell, about the matter.

The most striking peculiarity of Farnham, as seen from the cliff behind the "Jolly Farmer," is the abundance of hop gardens. As far as the eye can reach, in all directions, little else appears to be cultivated. At the time I visited it, the appearance was very singular. From the tops of distant hills; creeping down into the valleys; even to the back doors of the houses in the princ.i.p.al street, the whole surface of the earth seemed clothed with stiff bristles.

About two thousand acres of land in this parish alone are planted with hop bines, and as each acre takes three thousand hop-poles to support the climbing crop, it follows that there were five or six millions of these poles standing bare and upright before the astonished eye. No wonder that a conical hill at a little distance looked like a gigantic hedgehog.

At the extreme westerly end of the main street of the town there is a small house on the left, standing some twenty feet back from the line of the other buildings. The s.p.a.ce between the house and the street is now covered by a conservatory. A greenhouse adjoins the house on the west side, and a large piece of ground fronting the street for some distance is occupied as a nursery, and, when I saw it, was gay with flowers and verdure. In the year 1823 this house, together with a large plot of adjoining land (now built upon), was the property of Charles Vince's father, and in this little house Charles Vince was born. The father was by trade a builder and carpenter, and was very skilful. If he had any intricate work on hand, it was his habit to go to bed, even in the day-time, in order that he might, undisturbed, work out in his mind the proper means of accomplis.h.i.+ng the end in view. He held a sort of duplex position. He was foreman to, and "the life and soul of the business" of, Messrs. Mason and Jackson, builders; but he had a private connection of his own, which he worked independently. He was greatly liked, and the late Sir George Barlow, a landed proprietor of the neighbourhood, made him a kind of factotum on his estate. He seems to have been a very original character; to have had superior abilities as an artificer; and to have had most of the qualities which go to form what is called a "successful" man. He was, however, a bad financier; he did not understand "business;" and so he went on through life, contented to remain where he was; his abilities securing to him competence and comfort; enabling him to give his children a good education; and to maintain his position as a respectable and worthy member of society. He had something of the old Puritan about him, and was "brimful of fun and humour." He was very original in speech and thought, and he was very earnest in his religious life and practice. A good story was told me of his quaint manner. At the chapel of which he was a member, one of the ministers having died, a successor was appointed, who in some way caused a division amongst his people, some of whom seceded. Mr. Vince, senior, remained. Some weeks afterwards it was decided by those who still held to the old chapel that it would be better for the minister to leave, but this decision was not made public. A few days after, one of the seceders, meeting Vince, said, "I understand you're going to buy your minister a new pulpit gown." "No," was the reply, "you've missed it; we're going to buy him a _new travelling cloak_."

Mrs. Vince, senior, was a member of a very good family in Suss.e.x, and was a woman of superior mental powers. She is described as a very industrious, careful, motherly woman; one to whom all the neighbours applied for advice and a.s.sistance in any trouble or emergency, and never in vain, for her heart was full of sympathy and her brain of fertility of resource. She was a pious, humble, G.o.d-fearing woman, who did her duty; trained her children carefully; set them the example of a truthful, practical, and loving Christian life; and had the satisfaction of seeing the results of her excellent example and precepts carried into full life and activity in the career of her only son.

Such were the parents of Charles Vince, and such the influences which surrounded his childhood. He was a bright, intelligent boy; he never had any trouble with his lessons, and was remarkably quick in arithmetic. His father was very proud of him, and he was sent to the best school in the place. It was kept by a nephew of the celebrated William Cobbett. "Tommy" Cobbett, as he was always called, seems to have been a favourable specimen of a country schoolmaster in those days. On his leaving the town, about 1837 or 1838, a Mr. Harrington took his place, and Charles Vince remained as a pupil for a time, but Harrington went to old Mr. Vince to say that he felt he was dishonest in taking his money, for "Charles ought to take my place and teach me."

Upon leaving school, Charles was duly bound apprentice to Messrs.

Mason and Jackson, where he was taught by his father. Without indentures of apprentices.h.i.+p in those days, an artificer had no status in his trade; yet it would seem, in this case, that the "binding" was regarded by each party as little more than a necessary formality, for the youth did not spend the whole of his time in the service of his nominal employers. He was always with his father, and Sir George Barlow took a great fancy to him. He worked on at his trade, however, for some years, and only left the workman's bench to a.s.sume the vocation of a teacher.

His parents were members of the Congregational Chapel in the place, and their son was a constant attendant at the Sunday school, first as a scholar and afterwards as a teacher. When he was about 17 or 18 years of age, one of his relatives, and the then master of the British School in the place, conceived the idea of establis.h.i.+ng a Mechanics'

Inst.i.tute. Vince joined the movement with ardour, and the little inst.i.tution was soon an accomplished fact. A grammar cla.s.s, to which Vince attached himself, was very popular among the young men of the town, and they soon after established a debating club. Here the latent talents in Vince developed themselves. He became a fluent speaker, and was soon asked to deliver a lecture. Being half a poet himself, he chose Poetry as his topic, and seems to have given himself up to the preparation of his subject with a determination to succeed. One of his old I companions (whose towering head, by the way, would be a splendid artist's "study" for an apostle) told me that at this time they read together "Paradise Lost," a great part of which he said he could still repeat from memory. Vince used to declaim aloud the "bits" that pleased him, and "he was never tired" of the pa.s.sage in the tenth book, where the poet, describing the change which followed the Fall, says--

"Some say He bid His angels turn askance The poles of Earth some ten degrees or more From the sun's axle; they with labour pushed Oblique the centric globe,...

...to bring in change Of seasons to each clime; else had the spring Perpetual smiled on Earth with verdant flowers, Equal in days and nights."

The condition of his mind at this time was so eloquently described to me by this friend, that I shall quote his words as I took them down from his own lips: "To ordinary appearance his mind was like a common flower; with beauty, perhaps, that would not catch the un.o.bservant eye; but intimate as I was, I could discover in his homely talk, beauties that those who only knew him slightly could not observe, because he kept his petals closed. He did not open to many, but I saw, or thought I saw, the germs of what he afterwards became."

The lecture was a great success, and the conductors of the Sunday school had no difficulty afterwards in persuading him to give short addresses to the children. He appears about this time to have decided to become a preacher, and his character became deepened and intensified by the determination. This is so well described in a letter from Farnham that I shall again quote: "When he first fully made up his mind to give his attention to preaching and teaching, he and I were deputed to visit a village about an hour's walk from this town to canva.s.s the houses, and see if a Sunday school could be established. I remember it was about this time of the year, and with what delight my friend seemed to drink in all the beauties of Nature on that quiet Sunday morning. _He seemed, to look on these things with new eyes_; and he often, in years long after, referred in sermons and in speeches to that Sunday morning's walk."

The Sunday school was established, and here, "in one of Surrey's prettiest villages," Vince preached his first sermon in a cottage.

At this time, too, he became a politician, taking his lessons and forming his political creed from a most unlikely source, apparently.

This was the _Weekly Dispatch_, a paper that in those days was scarcely thought to be proper reading for young people. He read it, however, with avidity, and there is no doubt that it had much to do with forming his political character, and in laying the foundation of the st.u.r.dy inflexibility with which he held to his political principles. One of his early friends says, "He liked the _Weekly Dispatch_. The politics, being racy, had a great attraction for him, and he used to drink them in ravenously."

From this time he was the "pet speaker" of the place. His lectures at the Mechanics' Inst.i.tute were delivered frequently, and became immensely popular. The lecture-room was far too small for the eager listeners who crowded to hear him. "A large market room" was taken, and here, when he lectured, there was no s.p.a.ce for many who wished to hear him. He preached on Sundays in the villages around, and at length was asked to occupy a pulpit in Farnham itself. "I remember," says one of his friends, "his first sermon in the old Congregational Chapel.

The place was crammed to excess, by people too who were not in the habit of attending such places."

All this time, this "carpenter, and son of a carpenter," worked diligently at his trade; but a sudden vacancy occurring in the management of the Farnham British Schools, he was asked to become the master. He did so. He left the carpenter's bench on a Sat.u.r.day, and became schoolmaster on the following Monday. This, however, was but a temporary arrangement, for he was at the time negotiating with the managers of Stepney College to become a pupil there; and, an opportunity shortly afterwards occurring, which he had very promptly to accept or refuse, he somewhat abruptly vacated his seat as a schoolmaster, and became once more a scholar.

This was in 1848. He remained in the college four years, and he soon learned to laugh heartily at his Farnham Latin and his Farnham lectures. He was in the habit, while at the college, of going on Sundays to hear the best preachers in the Metropolis, and he has told me that he often walked from Stepney to Camberwell to hear Melvill, who was then the most popular preacher in London.

At the end of his academic career he was invited to become the minister at Mount Zion Chapel, in Birmingham. How he laboured here every one in the town can testify, and I need not say one word; but there is one fact that should be more generally known, as it shows one result of his work. In the year before he came to Birmingham (1851), the sum collected in this chapel for the Baptist Missions was 28 4s. 11d. The report for 1874--the last under his care--gives the amount collected in the year as 332 5s. 5d.

I am obliged to omit much that is interesting, but I have at least shown that his childhood's home was comfortable and respectable, and that he did not spend his boyhood among companions unworthy of him.

In his native town his memory is as warmly cherished as it is in Birmingham. His last public act there was to preach the first sermon in a new and remarkably handsome Congregational Church, and it is said that on that occasion, the number of people who sought to hear him was so great, that the Church, although a s.p.a.cious one, would not contain the half of them. "There was no room to receive them; no, not so much as about the door."

A handsome gothic cross has recently been erected over Vince's grave.

It bears the following inscription:

TO THE MEMORY OF

CHARLES VINCE,

BORN, JULY 6, 1824; DIED, OCTOBER 22, 1874: WHO FOR TWENTY-TWO TEARS WAS THE MINISTER OF GRAHAM STREET CHAPEL, IN THIS TOWN.