Note 32 — II HENRY VAUGHAN 1621-1695

Anthologies and cyclopædias nowadays, especially since Dr. John Brown and Principal Shairp drew attention to the Silurist in their pages, are more than likely to admit him. It was not so always. Winstanley, sharp as was his eye, let Vaughan escape him in his Lives of the Poets, published in 1687. He is not in the Theatrum Poetarum, nor in Johnson’s Lives. He is in neither of Southey’s collections. Mr. Palgrave allows him, in The Golden Treasury, but a song and a half; Ellis’s sheaf of excellent Specimens of 1811 furnishes eighteen lines of a wedding blessing on the Best and Most Accomplished Couple apologizing for “their too much quaintness and conceit”; and in Willmott’s Sacred Poets Vaughan occupies four pages, as against Crashaw’s thirty-five, Herbert’s thirty-seven, and Wither’s one hundred and thirty-two. But Vaughan fares well in Dr. George Macdonald’s England’s Antiphon, and in Archbishop Trench’s Household Book. Ward’s English Poets, in the second volume, has a conventional selection from him, as has, at greater length, Fields’ and Whipple’s Family Library of British Poetry. There is a goodly list entered under Vaughan’s name in Gilfillan’s Less-Known British Poets, all chosen from his devotional work. Thirty-seven religious lyrics again adorn the splendid Treasury of Sacred Song. Vaughan’s secular numbers yet await their proper bays, although a limited edition of most of them, containing a bibliography, was printed in 1893 by J. R. Tutin of Hull. Mr. Saintsbury, in his Seventeenth Century Lyrics, has a small and very choice group of Vaughan’s songs, and Professor Palgrave, having to do with him for the third time, gives him large and cordial honor in the eleventh volume of Y Cymmrodor. In Emerson’s Parnassus he appears but once. He had his most graceful and grateful American tribute when Mr. Lowell, long ago, named him in passing as “dear Henry Vaughan,” in A Certain Condescension in Foreigners.