SOURCE: "The Prose Treatises," in Henry Vaughan: A Life and Interpretation, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1947, pp. 127-40.

Hutchinson was an English academic and scholar who wrote what is recognized as the most complete biographical and critical treatment of Vaughan to date. His Henry Vaughan: A Life and Interpretation was composed using research materials—notebooks, files, genealogies, copies of legal documents, magazine articles, and correspondence—assembled by Gwenllian Morgan and Louise Guiney, both of whom died before their own proposed biography of Vaughan could be written. In the following excerpt from his chapter "The Prose Treatises, " Hutchinson examines the translation, devotions, and treatises which appear in Olor Iscanus, The Mount of Olives, and Flores Solitudinus. His purpose for doing so stems from the belief that the mind of Vaughan becomes "clearer to us if we take stock of the books which he was reading, translating, and writing in...