Mr. Collins died in October 1755, and was buried under the same stone, but without any additional inscription. Mr. Edward Collins was the eldest son of John Collins, Esq. of Treworgan, in St. Erme, and brother of Mr. John Collins, Rector of Redruth. He studied for some years at the Temple, with the view of being called to the bar, and it is said that he became a clergyman from principles of conscience.
Mr. Collins retained uniformly through life the respect of all around him; he appears to have been a man of learning and of taste, but of austere manners. I have heard from one who was present, that Mr. and Mrs. Collins meeting accidentally, at a neighbouring gentleman’s, a lady who was not of the Established Church, they refused to hold any conversation with her.
Their only son, Mr. John Collins, Vicar of Ledbury in Herefordshire, supported the reputation derived from his father. He distinguished himself as a man of letters on various occasions; one of the editors of Shakspeare left his library to Mr. Collins, in gratitude for assistance afforded him, and there may be found a very curious note at the conclusion of Troilus and Cressida, in the edition by Johnson and Steevens, with Mr. Collins’s name subscribed.
The next Vicar of St. Earth was Mr. Symonds, who acquired the living through a curious combination of circumstances. Mr. John Stephens, the principal merchant at St. Ives, and agent for the Earl of Buckinghamshire in the management
of the borough, was a zealous Presbyterian. The living of St. Ives with Lelant, had been designed for some young man of the town, who indiscreetly, and probably in joke, declared that when he succeeded to the church he would preach furiously against Presbyterians, and teach that Hell itself was strewed over with their bones. This was said in a garden, in defiance of the Cornish proverb, Nynges gun heb lagas, na kei heb scover. “There is no downs without eyes, nor hedge or wall without ears.” And Mr. Stephens walking in a garden adjoining overheard this declaration, and in consequence exerted his influence with the patron to obtain the living from the Bishop of Exeter for one who might prove less unfavourably disposed towards his sect, the only one at that time considered as formidably hostile to the Established Church; and to ensure this object Mr. Symonds was selected, because his father, who exercised the trade of a barber at Cambridge, discharged also the office of clerk to a Presbyterian meeting-house.
Mr. Symonds was received as a friend at St. Ives, and elected into the Corporation. But in the course of a few years a violent struggle arose respecting the election of a Recorder, when Mr. Symonds most prudently considering that nothing further was likely to be obtained from those who had already given him a living, sold himself to the opposite party, carried the election for them by his casting vote, and received the living of St. Earth. See various Essays in the London Magazine, with the signature Y. Z. for 1767, pp. 225, 456, 464, 628; for 1768, pp. 25, 199, 575; for 1769, pp. 18, 235, 578.
Mr. Symonds died in 1775, and was succeeded by Mr. George Rhodes, of Devonshire, some time a Fellow of Exeter College. This gentleman having obtained preferment near his immediate connections, resigned the living in 1781, and was succeeded by Mr. Mayow, of Bray near Looe, who never resided, and died in the year 1800, when the benefice was given to Mr. Samuel Gurney, recently deceased (1833) and to whose memory a marble slab has been
immediately placed over the chancel door by his mother, in her ninety-fourth year.
The glebe land is more extensive and of greater value than in most other parishes, and the vicarage house is one of the best in Cornwall, a new front having been added by Mr. Collins, and some improvements made by Mr. Rhodes. There is also a rectorial glebe; and a large house near the eastern end of the bridge, stands on the spot where formerly was a barn for receiving the tithe corn.
There is a third slab stone in memory of Mr. Richard Shuckburgh, brother to the well-known mathematician and astronomer of Shuckborough, in Warwickshire. Mr. Humphrey Williams, then the resident curate, had married Miss Sarah Bate, his half-sister, who is also buried in St. Earth’s church.