ting hints about men of like passions with
himself, and about old times, the history of which--as of all times--
was not the history of their kings and queens, but of the creeds and
deeds of the "masses" who worked, and failed, and sorrowed, and
rejoiced again, unknown to fame. Whatsoever, meanwhile, their own
conclusions may be on the subject-matter of the book, they will
hardly fail to admire the extraordinary variety and fulness of Mr.
Vaughan's reading, and wonder when they hear--unless we are wrongly
informed--that he is quite a young man--

How one small head could compass all he knew.

He begins with the mysticism of the Hindoo Yogis. And to this, as we
shall hereafter show, he hardly does justice; but we wish now to
point out in detail the extended range of subjects, of each of which
the book gives some general notion. From the Hindoos he passes to
Philo and the neo-Platonists; from them to the pseudo-Dionysius, and
the Mysticism of the early Eastern Church. He then traces, shrewdly
enough, the influence of the pseudo-Areopagite and the Easterns on
the bolder and more practical minds of the Western Latins, and gives
a sketch of Bernard and his Abbey of Clairvaux, which brings
pleasantly enough before us the ways and works of a long-dead world,
which was all but inconceivable to us till Mr, Carlyle disinterred it
in his picture of Abbot Sampson, the hero of "Past and Present."

We are next introduced to the mystic schoolmen--Hugo and Richard of
St. Victor; and then to a far more interesting class of men, and one
with which Mr. Vaughan has more sympathy than with any of his
characters, perhaps because he knows more about them. His chapters
on the German Mysticism of the fourteenth century; his imaginary, yet
fruitful chronicle of Adolf of Arnstein, with its glimpses of Meister
Eckart, Suso, the "Nameless Wild," Ruysbroek, and Tauler himself, are
admirable, if merely as historic studies, and should be, and we doubt
not will be, read by many as practical commentaries on the "Theologia
Germanica," and on the selection from Tauler's "Sermons," now in
course of publication. Had all the book been written as these
chapters are, we should not have had a word of complaint to make,
save when we find the author passing over without a word of comment,
utterances which, right or wrong, contain the very keynote and
central idea of the men whom he is holding up to admiration, and as
we think, of Mysticism itself. T