Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II

E-text prepared by Susan Skinner, David Cortesi, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
At many points a period, comma or hyphen seems to be omitted in the original. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Where missing punctuation is not clearly an error, or the omission is harmless to the sense, the text remains as in the original.
Footnotes in the original appear on the page where they are referenced and are numbered from 1 on each page. In this edition footnotes are numbered consecutively throughout the book and are grouped following each chapter or poem to which they refer. A footnote reference is linked to the note text, and the text links back to the reference.


Recent inquiries into the life of Henry Vaughan have added but little to the information already contained in the memoirs of Mr. Lyte and Dr. Grosart. I have, however, been enabled to put together a few notes on this somewhat obscure subject, which may be taken as supplementary to Mr. Beeching's Introduction in Vol. I. It will be well to preface them by reprinting the account of Anthony à Wood, our chief original authority ( Ath. Oxon. , ed. Bliss, 1817, iv. 425):
Anthony à Wood seems to have had some personal acquaintance with the poet, for in his account of Thomas Vaughan ( Ath. Oxon. iii. 725) he says that Olor Iscanus sent me a catalogue of his brother's works.
I am inclined to think that William Vaughan, censor of the College of Physicians, physician to William IIId., was one of the sons of our worthy mentioned by Mr. Lyte.... William Vaughan's 'age 20' in 1668 represents 1648 as the birth-date, and that fits in with the love-verse of the Poems of 1646.
Mr. G. T. Clark, in his Genealogies of Glamorgan , p. 240, gives the following account:—
Unfortunately Mr. Clark is unable to remember his authority for this pedigree. I have found another, which differs from it in many ways, and is exceedingly interesting, inasmuch as it gives, for the first time, the names of Henry Vaughan's two wives, who appear to have been sisters. It is in a volume of Brecknockshire Pedigrees collected by the Welsh Herald, Hugh Thomas, and now amongst the Harleian MSS. Hugh Thomas was born and lived hard by Llansantffread, and must have known Vaughan and his family personally.