F. Holland Day. St. Barbara (Louise Imogen Guiney) 1906.
II
HENRY VAUGHAN
1621-1695
“Who saint themselves, they are no saints!”
The introduction to his Mount of Olives (whose pages have a soft billowy music like Jeremy Taylor’s) is nominally inscribed to “the peaceful, humble, and pious reader.” That functionary must[66] have found it a trial to preserve his peaceful and pious abstraction, while the peaceful and pious author proceeded to flout the existing government, in a towering rage, and in very elegant caustic English. Vaughan was none too godly to be a thorough hater. He was genially disposed to the pretensions of every human creature; he refused to consider his ancestry and nurture by themselves, as any guarantee of the justice of his views or of his superior insight into affairs. Yet in spite of his enforced Quaker attitude during the clash of arms, he nursed in that gentle bosom the heartiest loathing of democracy, and shared the tastes of a certain clerk of the Temple “who never could be brought to write Oliver with a great O.” It is fortunate that he did not spoil himself, as Wither did, upon the wheels of party, for politics were his most vehement concern. Had he been richer, as he tells us in a playful passage, nothing on earth would have kept him from meddling with national issues.
The poets, save the greatest, Milton,[67] his friend Andrew Marvell, and Wither, rallied in a bright group under the royal standard. Those among them who did not fight were commonly supposed, as was Drummond of Hawthornden, to redeem their reputation by dying of grief at the overthrow of the King. Yet Vaughan did not fight, and Vaughan did not die of grief. It is so sure that he suffered some privation, and it may be imprisonment, for his allegiance, that shrewd guessers, before now, have equipped him and placed him in the ranks of the losing cause, where he might have had choice company. His generous erratic brother (a writer of some note, an alchemist, an Orientalist, a Rosicrucian, who was ejected from his vicarage in 1654, and died either of the plague, or of inhaling the fumes of a caldron, at Albury, in 1665, while the court was at Oxford)[24] had been a recruit, and a brave one. But Henry Vaughan explicitly tells [68]us, in his Ad Posteros, and in a prayer in the second part of Silex Scintillans, that he had no personal share in the constitutional struggle, that he shed no blood.
