An artist might have a worse subject for a picture than the interview to which we are about to refer. The Vicar of Manaccan, the Rev. Richard Polwhele, of Polwhele, ever busy in gathering information about Cornwall and Cornishmen, one day near the beginning of the present century, rides over to the quaint and pretty little fishing-cove of Coverack, near the Lizard, to have a chat with old Mrs. Loveday Incledon, the mother of the 'rantin' roarin' blade' (the youngest, I fancy, of a somewhat numerous family) who forms the subject of this memoir. Polwhele probably passed through the quiet little village of St. Keverne (with--that unusual sight in Cornwall--a tall _spire_ and a large church), where our hero was born. Reaching Coverack, the worthy Vicar doubtless opened the siege in due form, and with regular approaches to the old lady; but all his skill and blandishments were in vain. She would tell him plenty about the rebellion of '45, and repeat many scraps of old ballads referring to it; but not one word would she say about her _son_, then in the meridian of his fame. It was, however, probably she who told Polwhele that all the Incledons were musical, and that her boy Benjamin's aunt was celebrated for her rendering of 'Black-eyed Susan;'--but in the end the Vicar had to remount his nag, and return to his snug Vicarage of Manaccan, not much wiser than when he left it in the morning. Whether Incledon's mother's reticence was due to old age, or to the almost invariable reluctance of elderly people in the country to discuss family affairs with '_strangers_,' it would be hard to say; but it could scarcely be because the mention of her son's name and career gave her pain; for in her declining years he was the main source of her support till she died, after her husband, in 1808, eighty-one years of age. Incledon's father was a member of the medical profession, but probably not entitled to be described, as he was in some of the books of the day, as 'a respectable _physician_.' There is, however, a cosy little inn at St. Keverne, and on one of the stone posts of the back-door I have seen, deeply cut, the letters 'MICHAEL INCLEDON.' This would seem to give us perhaps the only clue now left to the home, during his boyhood, of the finest English singer of his day.