SOURCE: "Caroline Poetry," in A History of Elizabethan Literature, second edition, 1890. Reprint by The Macmillan Company., 1924, pp. 354-93.

Saintsbury was a late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century English literary historian and critic. Hugely prolific, he composed histories of English and European literature as well as numerous critical works on individual authors, styles, and periods. In the following excerpt from the second (1890) edition of his History of Elizabethan Literature (reprinted several times during its publishing history), Saintsbury briefly dismisses Vaughan as a poet lacking sustained poetic skill, depth, and originality.

Henry Vaughan was born in 1622, published Poems in 1646 (for some of which he afterwards expressed a not wholly necessary repentance), Olor Iscanus (from Isca Silurum) in 1651, and Silex Scintillans, his best-known book, in 1650 and 1656. He also published verses much later, and did not die till 1693, being the latest lived of any man who has a claim to appear in this book, but...