authority for this statement is the
_Athenae Oxonienses_ of Anthony Wood, but he is not the only authority,
and if he be not good enough for Miss Vaughan, she can take in his place
the exhaustive researches of the Rev. A. B. Grosart, whose edition of
the works of the Silurist Henry Vaughan have probably been neither seen
nor heard of by this unwise woman, in the same way that she is ignorant
of most essential elements in the matters which she presumes to treat.
The authority of a laborious scholar like Dr Grosart will probably be of
greater weight than the foul narrative of a Palladian memoir-maker, who
has not produced her documents. From this date it follows that in the
year 1636 Thomas Vaughan was still in the schoolboy period, not even of
sufficient age to begin a college career. He could not, as alleged, have
visited Fludd, the illustrious Kentish mystic, in London, nor would he
have been ripe for initiation, supposing that Fludd could have dispensed
it. In like manner, Andreae, assuming that he was Grand Master of the
Rosicrucians, would not have welcomed a youngster of fifteen years,
supposing that in those days he was likely to travel from London to
Stuttgart, but would have recommended him to return to his
lesson-books. The first voyage to America and all the earlier incidents
of the narrative are untrue for the same reason. In place of wandering
through Denmark, the Hague, and Sweden, initiating and being initiated,
he was drumming through a course at Oxford; in place of pious
pilgrimages to the shrine of Socinus, he was preparing to take orders in
the English Church, and the narrative which is untrue to his early is
untrue also to his later life. After receiving Holy Orders he returned
to his native village and took over the care of its souls. He was never
a Puritan; he was never a friend of Cromwell; he was a high-churchman
and a Royalist, and he was ejected from his living because he was
accused by political enemies of carrying arms for the king. He never
travelled; on the contrary, he married, at what period is unknown, but
his tender devotion to his wife is commemorated on the reverse pages of
an autograph alchemical MS. now in the British Museum, which belies
furthermore, in every line and word, the Luciferian imposture of the
Paris-cum-Yankee documents, by its passionate religious aspiration and
its adoring love of Christ.

When Vaughan came up to London, it was as a man who was somewhat out of
joint w