Eliphaz Levi and other occultist and Cabbalistic writers, with a
good deal of modern American Spiritualism thrown in. Albert Pike, a man
of considerable learning, could easily have invented it. Masonic
symbolism lends itself readily enough to a wide range of
interpretations. I do not say that seventeenth-century occultism has
left no traces upon Freemasonry which modern ritual-mongers may have
elaborated; but it is a far cry from this to the belief that Thomas
Vaughan and Luther were Manichaean worshippers of Lucifer and
Protestantism an organized warfare on Adonai.

[24] Miss Vaughan quotes from Allibone's _History of English
Literature_. Allibone only repeats Anthony a Wood's account.

[25] Robert Vaughan belonged to quite a different branch from the
Vaughans of Newton: and, as Sl. MS. 1741 shows, the father of Henry and
Thomas Vaughan did not die until 1658.

[26] Miss Vaughan gives an elaborate account of the Rosicrucians and of
their famous manifestoes, which I have no room to reproduce.

[27] Miss Vaughan states that Thomas Vaughan signed "not _Eugenius
Philalethes_, but _Eirenaeus Philalethes_" (p. 114). But she ascribes to
him the _Anthroposophia Theomagica_ and other writings which are signed,
though she does not mention it, _Eugenius Philalethes_ (p. 211). She
quotes from Anthony a Wood the assertion, which he does not make, that
the English translations of the _Fama Fraternitatis Rosae Crucis_ (1652)
and of Maier's _Themis Aurea_ (1656) both bear the name of Eugenius, and
were by another Thomas Vaughan! The manuscripts of both are, she says,
signed _Eirenaeus_ (p. 163). What Wood says is that he has seen a
translation of Maier's tract, dedicated to Elias Ashmole by [N. L.]/[T.
S.] H. S., and that Ashmole has forgotten whose the initials are. He
does not suggest that this translation is by a Thomas Vaughan. (_Ath.
Oxon._, iii. 724.)

[28] This episode has previously done duty in the _Vingt Ans Apres_
(vol. iii., ch. 8-10), of Alexandre Dumas, in which Mordaunt acts as the
executioner of Charles. There is a Latin poem amongst Vaughan's remains
in _Thalia Rediviva_ entitled _Epitaphium Gulielmi Laud Episcopi
Cantuariensis_, full of sorrow for the archbishop's death.

[29] Miss Vaughan refers to Lenglet-Dufresnoy's _Histoire de la
Philosophie Hermetique_ as an authority on Starkey's relations with
Eirenaeus Philalethes. Lenglet-Dufresnoy probably took his account from
_The Marrow of Alchemy_ (1654-5). The p