olume was a piracy,
for in his preface to "Ripley Revived" the author expressly laments that
two of its three treatises had passed out of his hands, and he feared
lest they should get into print, because they were imperfect works
preceding the period of solid knowledge which produced the "Open
Entrance." Again, so little was he consulted over the appearance of the
"Sophic Mercury" that the printer represents it as the work of an
American philosopher, whence it has been fathered upon George Starkey.

Eirenaeus Philalethes was undoubtedly a great traveller and he visited
America, but there is no ground for supposing that he was ever in Italy,
and that either he or Thomas Vaughan edited the works of Socinus is an
ignorant fiction, for which even Miss Vaughan can find no better warrant
than the evasive place of publication which figures on the title-page of
the _Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum_, namely, Eirenaeopolis. In like
manner she erroneously credits him with the authorship of the _Medulla
Alchemiae_, which is the work of Eirenaeus Philoponos Philalethes,
otherwise George Starkey.

These facts fully establish the fraudulent nature of Miss Vaughan's
family history, by whomsoever it has been devised, and seeing that where
it is possible to check it, it breaks down at every point, we need have
no hesitation in rejecting the information which it provides in those
cases where it cannot be brought to book. The connection of Faustus
Socinus with the Rosicrucian Fraternity, as founder, is one instance;
this is merely an extension of the imposture of Abbe Lefranc in his
"Veil Raised for the Curious," and it rests, like its original, on no
evidence which can be traced. Another is the Rosicrucian Imperatorship
of Andreae, and yet another the initiation of Robert Fludd. Again, the
connection of Philalethes with John Frederick Helvetius is based on
speculation only, and that of Ashmole with the institution of symbolical
Masonry has never been more than hypothesis, and not very deserving at
that. I regret to add that, on the authority of her bogus documents,
Miss Vaughan has given currency to a rumour that the founder of the
Ashmolean Museum poisoned his first wife. She deserves the most severe
reprobation for having failed to test her materials before she made
public this foul slander. Furthermore, in that portion of her materials
which is concerned with her family history, she is not above tampering
with the sense of printed books