spare them long. They may be
less in fashion at one time than another, but their beauty and life-giving
powers are perennial. The Muse of English poesy has always been baptized
in their waters.

The brothers left for Oxford at the mature age--not a whit too late for
any minds--of seventeen or eighteen. At the University there were other
words than the songs of Apollo. The Great Revolution was already on the
carpet, and it was to be fought out with weapons not found in the logical
armory of Aristotle. The brothers were royalists, of course; and Henry,
before the drama was played out, like many good men and true, tasted the
inside of a prison--doubtless, like Lovelace and Wither, singing his
heartfelt minstrelsy behind the wires of his cage. He was not a fighting
man. Poets rarely are. More than one lyrist--as Archilochus and Horace may
bear witness--has thrown away his shield on the field of battle. Vaughan
wisely retired to his native Wales. Jeremy Taylor, too, it may be
remembered, was locking up the treasures of his richly-furnished mind and
passionate feeling within the walls of those same Welsh hills. Nature,
alone, however, is inadequate to the production of a true poet. Even
Wordsworth, the most patient, absorbed of recluses, had his share of
education in London and travel in foreign cities. Vaughan, too, early
found his way, in visits, to the metropolis, where he heard at the Globe
Tavern the last echoes of that burst of wit and knowledge which had spoken
from the tongue and kindled in the eye of Shakspeare, Spenser and Raleigh.
Ben Jonson was still alive, and the young poets who flocked to him, as a
later age worshipped Dryden, were all "sealed of the tribe of Ben."
Randolph and Cartwright were his friends.

Under these early inspirations of youth, nature, learning, witty
companionship, Vaughan published his first verses--breathing a love of his
art and its pleasures of imagination, paying his tribute to his paternal
books in "Englishing," the "Tenth Satyre of Juvenal," and not forgetting,
of course, the lovely "Amoret." A young poet without a lady in his verse
is a solecism which nature abhors. All this, however, as his biographer
remarks, "though fine in the way of poetic speculation, would not do for
every-day practice." Of course not; and the young "swan" turned his wary
feet from the glittering stream to the solid land. The poet became a
physician. It was a noble art for such a spirit to practise, and not