Vaughan was torn in Wales, on the banks of the Uske, in Brecknockshire, in 1614. His father was a gentleman, but, we presume, poor, as his son was bred to a profession. Young Vaughan became first a lawyer, and then a physician; and we suppose, had it not been for his advanced life, he would have become latterly a clergyman, since he grew, when old, exceedingly devout. In life, he was not fortunate, and we find him, like Chamberlayne, complaining bitterly of the poverty of the poetical tribe. In 1651, he published a volume of verse, in which nascent excellence struggles with dim obscurities, like a young moon with heavy clouds. But his 'Silex Scintillans,' or 'Sacred Poems,' produced in later life, attests at once the depth of his devotion, and the truth and originality of his genius. He died in 1695. Campbell, always prone to be rather severe on pious poets, and whose taste, too, was finical at times, says of Vaughan--'He is one of the harshest even of the inferior order of the school of conceit; but he has some few scattered thoughts that meet the eye amidst his harsh pages, like wild flowers on a barren heath.' Surely this is rather 'harsh' judgment. At the same time, it is not a little laughable to find that Campbell has himself appropriated one of these 'wild flowers.' In his beautiful 'Rainbow,' he cries-- 'How came the world's gray fathers forth To mark thy sacred sign!' Vaughan had said-- 'How bright wert thou, when Shem's admiring eye, Thy burnished, flaming arch did first descry; When Terah, Nahor, Haran, Abram, Lot, The youthful world's gray fathers in one knot, Did with intentive looks watch every hour For thy new light, and trembled at each shower!' Indeed, all Campbell's 'Rainbow' is just a reflection of Vaughan's, and reminds you of those faint, pale shadows of the heavenly bow you sometimes see in the darkened and disarranged skies of spring. To steal from, and then strike down the victim, is more suitable to robbers than to poets. Perhaps the best criticism on Vaughan may be found in the title of his own poems, 'Silex Scintillans.' He had a good deal of the dulness and hardness of the flint about his mind, but the influence of poverty and suffering,--for true it is that 'Wretched men Are cradled into poetry by wrong; They learn in suffering what they teach in song,'-- and latterly the power of a genuine, though somewhat narrow piety, struck out glorious scintillations from the bare but rich rock. He ranks with Crashaw, Quarles, and Herbert, as one of the best of our early religious poets; like them in their faults, and superior to all of them in refinement and beauty, if not in strength of genius. ON A CHARNEL-HOUSE.