[23] Vaughan apparently enjoyed that privilege of genius, acquaintance with a London garret, if we may take autobiographically the fine brag worthy of the tribe of Henri Mürger:
“I scorn your land,
So far it lies below me; here I see
How all the sacred stars do circle me.”
[24] The King lodged at Christchurch, the Queen and my Lady Castlemaine (together, alas!) at Merton, amid endless hawking, tennis, boating, basset, and general revelry.
[25] Orinda’s own verses, scattered in manuscript among her friends, were collected and printed without her knowledge, and much against her desire, in 1663: a piece of treachery which threw her into a severe indisposition. She could therefore condole more than enough with Henry Vaughan. Friends were officious creatures in those days.
[26] This, to say the least, was not “pretty” of Campbell, who thought so well of the “world’s grey fathers” congregated to gaze at Vaughan’s Rainbow that he conveyed them bodily into the foreground of his own.
[27] Per´-spective was, of course, the general pronunciation from Shakespeare to Dr. Johnson, and is used with great beauty in Dryden’s Ode to the Memory of Mrs. Anne Killigrew. But it is a characteristic word with Vaughan, and it was from Vaughan that Wordsworth took it.
[28] Vaughan had a relish for damp weather, the thing which makes the loveliness of the British isles, and which the ungrateful islanders are prone to revile. He never passes a sheet of water without looking upward for the forming cloud:
“That drowsy lake