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."

But for this sente