The story is suggestive and curious, but in literary and romantic merit it will bear no comparison with the “Chemical Nuptials of Christian Rosencreutz.” EIRENÆUS PHILALETHES. In “The Real History of the Rosicrucians,” having no space for an adequate discussion of the question, I followed the more general opinion of Hermetic writers by identifying the author of the _Introitas Apertus_ with the author of the _Lumen de Lumine_, Thomas Vaughan, and concluded that he wrote indifferently under the pseudonyms of Eugenius Philalethes and Eirenæus Philalethes. Certain misleading references in great but fallible bibliographies, and one piece of inextricable confusion in the text of the _Introitus Apertus_, made this view appear to be fairly reasonable. However, in the course of a somewhat detailed notice, a writer in the _Saturday Review_ has taken me to task, by no means discourteously, be it said, for inaccuracy in my account of Vaughan. On the authority of Ashmole and Wood, he states that this personage was the brother of the Silurist poet, Henry Vaughan, that he was born at Llansaintfraid, in Brecknockshire, during the year 1621, that he graduated at Jesus College, Oxford, took orders, and returned to hold the living of his native parish. Under the Commonwealth he was ejected as a Royalist, and then betook himself to chemical experiments, one of which cost him his life on the 27th of February 1665. Now, it is clear that these facts do not correspond with the life, such as we know it, of the author of the _Introitus Apertus_, and the identification of the two Philalethes, a habit which is apparently unknown to the Saturday Reviewer, must be therefore abandoned. Why this identification has hitherto taken place, and why, with some misgivings, it was continued in my work on the Rosicrucians, may be very easily explained. The grounds of the confusion are these:--First, the similarity of the assumed name, half of which was common to them both, while the other half appears to have been interchangeable in the minds of historians and bibliographers alike, including the compilers of the Catalogue in the Library of the British Museum, which attributes the _Introitus Apertus_ indiscriminately to both Philalethes. Second, the fact that almost every edition and translation of this treatise contains the following passage in the initial paragraph of the preface:--