He graduated MA in 1764 and DD in 1776, and two years later received the vicarage of Longdon, Wiltshire, which, however, he exchanged within six months for the rectory of All Hallows, Thames Street.

A sermon preached by him in 1792 at St. Margaret's, Westminster, for the benefit of the greycoat charity, attracted attention, and when reprinted in the following year by the Patriotic Association against republicans and levellers, twenty thousand copies were sold.

As the waste marshlands of the Tuttle or Tothill Fields were beginning to be built over, Vincent simply employed a man with a horse to plough a ditch around an area of some eleven acres; his receipt for the fee is in the Abbey archives.

[citation needed] In his adherence to corporal punishment he resembled his predecessor, Richard Busby; and in 1792 he expelled Robert Southey for his contributions to an anti-flogging periodical, The Flagellant.

They were all paid for by the dean and chapter; but in 1805 Vincent addressed a letter to Pitt praying for a national grant for the restoration of the Henry VII Chapel.

The manner in which it was carried out, especially the interference with the tomb of Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, to make way for the new Addison monument, was severely criticised in the Gentleman's Magazine by John Carter, the architect.

[4][5] He also directed the restoration of the great rose or marigold window; and caused the enormous monuments of Captains Harvey, Hutt, and Montagu (killed in Admiral Howe's victory of the "Glorious First of June" 1794) to be removed from between the pillars of the nave to their present positions.

Pitt and Charles James Fox were buried in the abbey in 1806, and the Duc de Montpensier (brother of Louis-Philippe) in the Henry VII Chapel in the following year.

[1] Vincent made his reputation as a classical scholar by the publication of a Latin treatise entitled De Legione Manlianâ Quæstio ex Livio desumta, et rei militaris Romanæ studiosis proposita.

Vincent had to defend his work against the charges of insufficient research and plagiarism (from a writer in the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica'), advanced in the Hermes Unmasked of Thomas Gunter Browne.

In 1797 he issued his commentary on Arrian's Voyage of Nearchus (contained in the Indica), which he terms 'the first event of general importance to mankind in the history of navigation'.

Vincent had the assistance of Alexander Dalrymple, hydrographer to the admiralty, who prepared charts, and of Samuel Horsley, then dean of Westminster, who furnished two astronomical dissertations.

For the first series of the British Critic, conducted by his friend Nares, he wrote several important reviews, and, in connection with the Troad controversy, attacked the views of Jacob Bryant, whom he charged with falsifying passages in Diodorus Siculus.

[1] William Beloe thought Vincent one of the soundest scholars in Europe, an opinion corroborated by Thomas James Mathias in Pursuits of Literature (third dialogue).

The poet William Cowper made an English translation of some Latin verses written by Vincent, when second master at Westminster, on his predecessor Pierson Lloyd.