While Henry Vaughan was preparing for publication the first half of _Silex Scintillans_ as the token of his arrested and uplifted youth, Rev. Mr. Thomas Vaughan, backed by a few other sanguine Oxonians, and disregardful of his twin’s exaggerated remorse for the fruits of his profaner years, brought out the “formerly written and newly named” _Olor Iscanus_, over the author’s head, in 1650, and gave to it a motto from the Georgics. The preface is in Eugenius Philalethes’ own gallant style, and offers a haughty commendation to “beauty from the light retired.” Perhaps Vaughan’s earliest and most partial editor felt, like Thoreau on a certain occasion, that it were well to make an extreme statement, if only so he might make an emphatic one. He chose to supplicate the public of the Protectorate in this wise: “It was the glorious Maro that referred his legacies to the fire, and though princes are seldom executors, yet there came a Cæsar to his testament, as if the act of a poet could not be repealed but by a king. I am not, reader, Augustus Vindex: here is no royal rescue, but here is a Muse that deserves it. The author had long ago condemned these poems to obscurity and the consumption of that further fate which attends it. This censure gave them a gust of death, and they have partly known that oblivion which our best labors must come to at last. I present thee, then, not only with a book, but with a prey, and, in this kind, the first recoveries from corruption. Here is a flame hath been some time extinguished, thoughts that have been lost and forgot, but now they break out again like the Platonic reminiscency. I have not the author’s approbation to the fact, but I have law on my side, though never a sword: I hold it no man’s prerogative to fire his own house. Thou seest how saucy I am grown, and if thou dost expect I should commend what is published, I must tell thee I cry no Seville oranges; I will not say ‘Here is fine,’ or ‘cheap’: that were an injury to the verse itself, and to the effect it can produce. Read on; and thou wilt find thy spirit engaged, not by the deserts of what we call tolerable, but by the commands of a pen that is above it.” All this is uncritical, but useful and proper on the part of the clerical brother, who writes very much as Lord Edward Herbert might be supposed to write for George under like conditions; for he knew, according to an ancient adage, that there is great folly in pointing out the shortcomings of a work of art to eyes uneducated to its beauties. It was just as well to insist disproportionately upon the principle at stake, that Henry Vaughan’s least book was unique and precious. He was not, like the majority of the happy lyrists of his time, a writer by accident; he was strictly a man of letters, and his sign-manual is large and plain upon everything which bears his name. He indites like a Roman, with evenness and without a superfluous syllable. One cannot italicize