Eight little books, if we count the two parts of _Silex Scintillans_ as one,[31] enclose all of the Silurist’s original work. He began to publish in 1646, and he practically ceased in 1655, reappearing but in 1678 with _Thalia Rediviva_, which was not issued under his own supervision. It is commonly supposed that his verses were forgotten up to the date (1847) of the faulty but timely Aldine edition of the Rev. H. F. Lyte, thrice reprinted and revised since then, and until the appearance of Dr. Grosart’s four inestimable quartos; but Mr. Carew Hazlitt has been fortunate enough to discover the advertisement of an eighteenth-century reprint of Vaughan. As the results of Dr. Grosart’s patient service to our elder writers are necessarily semi-private, it may be said with truth that the real Vaughan is still debarred from the general reader, who is, indeed, the identical person least concerned about that state of affairs. His name is not irrecoverable nor unfamiliar to scholars.[32] His mind, on the whole, might pass for the product of yesterday; and he, who needs no glossary, may handsomely cede the honors of one to Mr. William Morris. It is at least certain that had Vaughan lately lifted up his sylvan voice out of Brecknockshire, he would not so readily be accused of having modelled himself unduly upon George Herbert.[33] He has gone into eclipse behind that gracious name. Henry Vaughan was a child of thirteen when Herbert, a stranger to him, died at Bemerton, and he read him first in the sick-chamber to which the five years’ distresses of his early manhood confined him. The reading could not have been prior to 1647, for _Olor Iscanus_, Vaughan’s second volume, was lying ready for the press that year, as we know from the date of its dedication to Lord Kildare Digby. As no novice poet, therefore, he fell under the spell of a sweet and elect soul, who was also a lover of vanquished royalty, a convert who had looked upon the vanities of the court and the city, a Welshman born, and not unconnected with Vaughan’s own ancient and patrician house. These were slight coincidences, but they served to strengthen a forming tie. The Silurist somewhere thanks Herbert’s “holy ever-living lines” for checking his blood; and it was, perhaps, the only service rendered of which he was conscious. But his endless iambics and his vague allegorical titles are cast thoroughly in the manner of Herbert, and he takes from the same source the heaped categorical epithets, the didactic tone, and the introspectiveness which are his most obvious failings. Vaughan’s intellectual debt to Herbert resolves itself into somewhat less than nothing; for in following him with zeal to the Missionary College of the Muses, he lost rather than gained, and he is altogether delightful and persuasive only where he is altogether himself. Nevertheless, a certain spirit of conformity and filial piety towards Herbert has betrayed Vaughan into frequent and flagrant imitations.