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VAUGHAN, C. J.—VAUGHAN, H.
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(1647). In this work he maintained that words and expressions were to be judged by the current usage of the best society, of which, as an habitué of the Hôtel de Rambouillet, Vaugelas was a competent judge. He shares with Malherbe the credit of having purified French diction. His book fixed the current usage, and the classical writers of the 17th century regulated their practice by it. Protests against the academical doctrine were not lacking. Scipion Dupleix in his Liberty de la langue française dans sa pureté (1651) pleaded for the richer and freer language of the 16th century, and Francois de la Mothe le Vayer took a similar standpoint in his Lettres à Gabriel Naudi touchant les Remarques sur la langue française. Towards the end of his life Vaugelas became tutor to the sons of Thomas Francis of Savoy, prince of Carignan. He died in Paris in February 1650. His translation from Quintus Curtius, La Vie d'Alexandre (posthumously published in 1653) deserves notice as an application of the author’s own rules.

Bibliography.—See Remarques sur la langue française, edited with a key by V. Conrart, and introductory notes by A. Chassang (Paris, 1880). The principles of Vaugelas’s judgments are explained in the Etudes critiques (7e serie) of M. Brunetiere, who regards the name of Vaugelas as a symbol of all that was done in the first hall of the 16th century to perfect and purify the French language. See also F. Brunot in the Histoire de la langue et litterature française of Petit de Julleville.

VAUGHAN, CHARLES JOHN (1816–1897), English scholar and divine, was educated at Rugby and Cambridge, where he was bracketed senior classic with Lord Lyttelton in 1838. In 1839 he was elected fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and for a short time studied law. He took orders, however, in 1841, and became vicar of St Martin’s, Leicester. Three years later he was elected headmaster of Harrow. He resigned the headmastership in 1859 and accepted the bishopric of Rochester, but afterwards withdrew his acceptance. In 1880 he was appointed vicar of Doncaster. He was appointed master of the Temple in 1869, and dean of Llandaff in 1879. In 1894 he was elected president of University College, Cardiff, in recognition of the prominent part he took in its foundation. Vaughan was a well-known Broad Churchman, an eloquent preacher arid an able writer on theological subjects, his numerous works including lectures, commentaries and sermons; he was joint-author with the Rev. John Llewelyn Davies (b. 1826)—also a well-known Cambridge scholar and Broad Churchman—of a well-known translation of Plato’s Republic.

VAUGHAN, HENRY (1622–1695), called the “Silurist,” English poet and mystic, was born of an ancient Welsh family at Newton St Briget near Scethrog by Usk, Brecknockshire, on the 17th of April 1622. His grandfather, Thomas Vaughan, was the son of Charles Vaughan of Tretower Castle, and had acquired the farm of Newton by marriage. From 1632 to 1638 he and his twin brother Thomas, noticed below, were privately educated by the Rev. Matthew Herbert, rector of Llangattock, to whom they both addressed Latin verses expressing their gratitude. Anthony à Wood, who is the main authority for Vaughan’s biography, says that Henry was entered at Jesus College, Oxford, in 1638, but no corroboration of the statement is forthcoming, although Thomas Vaughan’s matriculation is entered, nor does Henry Vaughan ever allude to residence at the university.[1] He was sent to London to study law, but turning his attention to medicine, he became a physician, and settled first at Brecon and later at Scethrog to the practice of his art. He was regarded, says Wood, as an “ingenious person, but proud and humorous.” It seems likely that he fought on the king’s side in the Welsh campaign of 1645, and was present at the battle of Rowton Heath. In 1646 appeared Poems, with the Tenth Satyre of Juvenal Englished, by Henry Vaughan, Gent. The poems in this volume are chiefly addressed to “Amoret,” and the last is on Priory Grove, the home of the “matchless Orinda,” Mrs Katharine Philips. A second volume of secular verse, Olor Iscanus, which takes its name from the opening verses addressed to the Isca (Usk), was published by a friend, probably Thomas Vaughan, without the author’s consent, in 1651. The book includes three prose translations from Latin versions of Plutarch and Maximus of Tyre, and one in praise of a country life from Guevara. The preface is dated 1647, and the reason for Vaughan’s reluctance to print the book is to be sought in the preface to Silex Scintillans: or Sacred Poems and Pious Ejaculations (1650). There he says: “The first that with any effectual success attempted a diversion of this foul and overflowing stream (of profane poetry) was the blessed man, Mr George Herbert, whose holy life and verse gained many pious converts, of whom I am the least.” He further expresses his debt in “The Match,” when he says that his own “fierce, wild blood . . . is still tam’d by those bright fires which thee inflam’d.” His debt to Herbert extended to the form of his poetry and sometimes to the actual expressions used in it, and a long list of parallel passages has been adduced. His other works are The Mount of Olives: or Solitary Devotions, with a translation, Man in Glory, from the Latin of Anselm (1652); Flores Solitudinis (1654), consisting of two prose translations from Nierembergius, one from St Eucherius, and a life of Paulinus, bishop of Nola; Hermetical Physick, translated from the Naturae Sanctuarium of Henricus Nollius; Thalia Rediviva; The Pass-Times and Diversions of a Country Muse (1678), which includes some of his brother’s poems. Henry Vaughan died at Scethrog on the 23rd of April 1695, and was buried in the churchyard of Llansantffraed.

As a poet Vaughan comes latest in the so-called “metaphysical” school of the 17th century. He is a disciple of Donne, but follows him mainly as he saw him reflected in George Herbert. He analyses his experiences, amatory and sacred, with excessive ingenuity, striking out, every now and then, through his extreme intensity of feeling and his close observation of nature, lines and phrases of marvellous felicity. He is of imagination all compact, and is happiest when he abandons himself most completely to his vision. It is, as Canon H. C. Beeching has said, “undoubtedly the mystical element in Vaughan’s writing by which he takes rank as a poet . . . it is easy to see that he has a passion for Nature for her own Sake, that he has observed her moods; that indeed the world is to him no less than a veil of the eternal spirit, whose presence may be felt in any, even the smallest part.” In this imaginative outlook on Nature he no doubt exercised great influence on Wordsworth, who is known to have possessed a copy of his poems, and it is difficult to avoid seeing in “The Retreat” the germ of the later poet’s “Ode on Intimations of Immortality.” By this poem, with “The World,” mainly because of its magnificent opening stanza, “Beyond the Veil,” and “Peace,” he is best known to the ordinary reader.

The complete works of Henry Vaughan were edited for the Fuller Worthies Library by Dr A. B. Grosart in 1871. The Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, were edited in 1896 by Mr E. K. Chambers, with an introduction by Canon H. C. Beeching, for the Muses' Library.

VAUGHAN, HERBERT (1832–1903), cardinal and archbishop of Westminster, was born at Gloucester on the 15th of April 1832, the eldest son of lieutenant-colonel John Francis Vaughan, head of an old Roman Catholic family, the Vaughans of Courtfield, Herefordshire. His mother, a daughter of John Rolls of The Hendre, Monmouthshire, was intensely religious; and all the daughters of the family entered convents, while six of the eight sons took priest’s orders, three of them rising to the episcopate, Roger becoming archbishop of Sydney, and John bishop of Sebastopolis. Herbert spent six years at Stonyhurst, and was then sent to study with the Benedictines at Downside, near Bath, and subsequently at the Jesuit school of Brugelette, Belgium, which was afterwards removed to Paris. In 1851 he went to Rome. After two years of study at the Accademia dei nobili ecclesiastici, where he became a friend and disciple of Manning, he took priest’s order’s at Lucca in 1854. On his return to England he became for a period

  1. Two poems in the Eucharistica Oxoniensia (1641) are signed “H. Vaughan, Jes. Coll.,” but are probably by a contemporary of the same name, noticed by Wood. See Mr E. K. Chambers’s biographical note in vol. ii. of Vaughan’s Works.