From a Cornish Window / A New Edition - Arthur Quiller-Couch

"How like an Angel came I down!
How bright are all things here!
When first among His works I did appear
how their Glory me did crown!
The world resembled His Eternity,
In which my soul did walk;
And everything that I did see
Did with me talk.
"The streets were paved with golden stones,
The boys and girls were mine,
O how did all their lovely faces shine!
The sons of men were holy ones;
In joy and beauty they appeared to me:
And everything which here I found,
While like an angel I did see,
Adorned the ground."
'Proprieties.'—

That is to say, 'properties,' 'estates.'—

"Proprieties themselves were mine,
And hedges ornaments,
Walls, boxes, coffers, and their rich contents
Did not divide my joys, but all combine.
Clothes, ribbons, jewels, laces, I esteemed
My joys by others worn;
For me they all to wear them seemed
When I was born."

Dr. Grosart then set about preparing a new and elaborate edition of Vaughan, which, only just before his death, he was endeavouring to find means to publish. After his death the two manuscripts passed by purchase to Mr. Charles Higham, the well-known bookseller of Farringdon Street, who in turn sold them to Mr. Dobell. Later, when a part of Dr. Grosart's library was sold at Sotheby's, Mr. Dobell bought—and this is perhaps the strangest part of the story—a third manuscript volume, which Dr. Grosart had possessed all the time without an inkling that it bore upon Mr. Brooke's discovery, "though nothing is needed but to compare it with the other volumes in order to see that all these are in the same handwriting."

Mr. Dobell examined the writings, compared them with Vaughan's, and began to have his doubts. Soon he felt convinced that Vaughan was not their author. Yet, if not Vaughan, who could the author be?

Again Mr. Brooke proved helpful. To a volume of Giles Fletcher's, Christ's Victory and Triumph, which he had edited, Mr. Brooke had appended a number of seventeenth-century poems not previously collected; and to one of these, entitled 'The Ways of Wisdom,' he drew Mr. Dobell's attention as he had previously drawn Mr. Grosart's. To Mr. Dobell the resemblance between it and the manuscript poems was at once evident. Mr. Brooke had found the poem in a little book in the British Museum entitled, A Serious and Patheticall Contemplation of the Mercies of God, in several most Devout and Sublime Thanksgivings for the same (a publisher's title it is likely): and this book contained other pieces in verse. These having been copied out by Mr. Dobell's request, he examined them and felt no doubt at all that the author of the manuscript poem and of the Devout and Sublime Thanksgivings must be one and the same person. But, again, who could he be?

A sentence in an address 'To the Reader' prefixed to the Devout and Sublime Thanksgivings provided the clue. The editor of this work (a posthumous publication), after eulogising the unnamed author's many virtues wound up with a casual clue to his identity:—

"But being removed out of the Country to the service of the late Lord Keeper Bridgman as his Chaplain, he died young and got early to those blissful mansions to which he at all times aspir'd."