;

of the poems in "Silex Scintillans" (his supreme achievement) that the form really elicits the idea. It is this inarticulateness, this only potential sublimity, that has obscured his lustre and diverted many from reading him except in anthologies. The earth lies heavy on his riches. Vaughan is rarely grotesque, as Crashaw sometimes is he does not debauch language by speaking of tears as walking baths, compendious oceans." When he strains or perverts a figure it is not out of wantonness, but because his painfully struggling idea can only grope a contorted way to life. It is extraordinary that Traherne, with his triumphantly mobile and symmetrical expression, should have been identified for two centuries with Vaughan.

What you find as the result of this divorce between the spiritual impulse and its metrical presentment are prosiness, flatness, aridity. Page after page of Vaughan's work is parched for want of the easy moisture of creative form. His passionate thought strikes a simile which generates another. Another radiates from that. Down they all go in dishevelled procession. At his worst, he cannot even command the rudiments of metre. He is as much at odds with his pauses, accents, and feet as with the proportions and rhythm of his language.

I cannot doubt that Vaughan was acutely conscious of this. Except where his utterance flows into concord with his poetic conception, this wrestling with the clay is manifest in every line, and to realize it is in great measure to solve the problem of his borrowings. It is important to notice that, on the whole, Vaughan does not borrow material, but phrases. When he does, as though he were held up in his effort to embody his thought, he takes them over bodily. The fact that they often read irrele

vantly to the march of his ideas—as though they were asides-strengthens the impression that they are temporary stopgaps. Vaughan is, indeed, sometimes derivative in his treatment of certain themes, and in his construction of certain conceits. But the "Metaphysicals" possessed a common stock, a reservoir of orthodox material, just as the Elizabethan sonneteers did. That does not impair Vaughan's originality. His usual process is, as I have said, to transplant lines and sentences wholesale. This helps to explain his particular indebtedness to Herbert. It was natural that Vaughan, the artist of ideas, should pay an exaggerated respect to Herbert, the artist of words. It is not the only instance in literature where the greater and more irregular mind has deferred to the lesser and neater one. Vaughan's inspiration looked to Herbert's more formal measures, not to stimulate, but to clothe it. His illusory, pathetic modesty sought blindly for form and in its eagerness pursued the lesser star of composition. It was a mistake, but an intelligible one. Only in the rare intervals, when Vaughan's imagination created its own felicitous content, did he shake off the weight of the clay like dew.

'Were all my loud evil days

Calm and unhaunted as in thy dark tent,

Whose

peace but by some angel's wing or voice
Is seldom rent;

Then I, in Heaven, all the long year

Would keep and never wander here.

But living where the sun

Doth all things wake, and where all mix and tyre

Themselves and others, I consent and run
To ev'ry myre.

And by this world's ill guiding light

Erre more than I can do by night.

There is in God (some say)

A deep but dazzling darkness, as men here
Say it is late and dusky because they
See not all clear.

O, for that night! where I in him
Might live invisible and dim."

That is Vaughan transfigured and breathing air in which Herbert could not live. That is Vaughan wearing heaven like a well-fitting cloak. When he writes like this (and there are plenty of other sporadic passages in "Silex Scintillans" of the same kind) there is no poet in the English language who is his better. We feel that this spasmodic form of Vaughan's is more worth than a whole lake of little technical fry.

I will offer no excuse for prattling about Robert Nares' Glossary (1822) in this letter. It is a book that should have Everyman's bacon and eggs spilt on it. I had the good fortune to come across the first edition of this invaluable repository of disused Elizabethan words on an East End bookstall. The biographies, encyclopædias, and books of reference have little to say about Nares (though a lengthy biography of his was, I believe, referred to by Macaulay) who, since practically every word contained in his quarto glossary has passed out of currency, bears, like Atlas, the weight of an entire language on his shoulders. He was obviously a man of vast industry, and he has quarried a multitude of quotations from very rare sources. He was too, one conjectures, a man of no humour, little imagination, and of a sceptical turn of mind. To Minshew's derivation of "gallimawfry," for instance, as a fry made for the maws (i.e. mouths) of slaves in the galleys, he replied, with inexorable gravity, "But this is mere stuff." Nor does he ever seem to be penetrated by the wonders, rarities, and oddities of the delightful world in which he wanders. His dedication to the King throws another light on his character:

"Under the auspices of Your Majesty, as Prince Regent, the former glory (i.e. of Elizabeth's reign) has been far surpassed; and, of the latter, the most sanguine Expectations are fully authorized, by what is already known of the Talents, Taste, and Beneficence of King George the Fourth."

Over such a dedication it is only decent to draw the journalistic veil.

To quote one in a hundred of the rich and mellow words which are collected in the Glossary would need the space of a small volume. I can only pick out a few of the more engaging at haphazard. "Mumpsimus, for instance. It means 66 an old error in which men obstinately persevere." A story is supposed to have been told about it by Henry VIII. According to him, the word is taken from an ignorant monk who, in his breviary, had always said "mumpsimus " instead of "sumpsimus," and on being told of his mistake, said it might be so for all he knew, but "mumpsimus" was what he was taught and “mumpsimus" would he continue to say. Latimer uses the word in his "Sermons" Some be so obstinate in their old mumpsimus, that they cannot abide the true doctrine of God." Curiously enough it has tramped obstinately right into comparatively modern days. Lamb naturally would, and does, use it in his letters, but I met twice with this sturdy ancient in Thomas Hardy. It may survive in dialect, until we are once more a small nation. "Muckinder," again, was a jocular term for a handkerchief, with an obvious derivation. Ben Jonson uses it: "Be of good comfort, take my muckinder and dry thine eyes." Another "M" is "mum-budget," meaning "silent," and still surviving in "mum's the