him; every word is a congested force, packed to bursting with meaning and insistence; the utterance of a man who has been thinking all his life upon his own chosen subjects, and who unerringly despatches a language about its business, as if he had just created it. Like Andrew Marvell’s excellent father, “he never broached what he had never brewed.” It follows that his work, to which second editions were wellnigh unknown, shows scarcely any variation from itself. It carries with it a testimony that, such as it stands, it is the very best its author can do. Its faults are not slips; they are quite as radical and congenital as its virtues. Vaughan (to transfer a fine phrase of Mr. W. T. Arnold) is “enamoured of perfection,” but he is fully so before he makes up his mind to write, and from the first every stroke of his pen is fatal. It transfixes a noun or a verb, pins it to the page, and challenges a reformer to move or replace it. His modest Muse is as sure as Shakespeare, as nice as Pope; she is incapable of scruples and apprehensions, once she has spoken. What Vaughan says of Cartwright may well be applied to his own deliberate grace of diction: “Thou thy thoughts hast drest in such a strain As doth not only speak, but rule and reign.” His verses have the tone of a Vandyck portrait, with all its firm pensive elegance and lack of shadow. Vaughan has very little quaintness, as we now understand that word, and none of the cloudiness and incorrigible grotesqueness which dominated his Alexandrian day. He has great temperance; he keeps his eye upon the end, and scarcely falls at all into “the fond adulteries of art,” inversions, unscholarly compound words, or hard-driven metaphors. If he be difficult to follow, it is only because he lives, as it were, in highly oxygenated air; he is remote and peculiar, but not eccentric. His conceits are not monstrous; the worst of them proclaims: “Some love a rose In hand, some in the skin; But, cross to those, I would have mine within”;