to Mr. Vaughan) opened up in one word.  And if this sentence does not bear directly on that problem, on what does it bear?  It was therefore with extreme disappointment that on reading this, and saying to ourselves:  “Now we shall hear at last what Mr. Vaughan himself thinks on the matter,” we found that he literally turned the subject off, as if not worth investigation, by making the next speaker answer, apropos of nothing, that “the traditional ascetism of the Friends is their fatal defect as a body.”

Why, too, has Mr. Vaughan devoted a few lines only to the great English Platonists, More, Norris, Smith of Jesus, Gale, and Cudworth?  He says, indeed, that they are scarcely Mystics, except in as far as Platonism is always in a measure mystical.  In our sense of the word they were all of them Mystics, and of a very lofty type; but surely Henry More is a Mystic in Mr. Vaughan’s sense also.  If the author of “Conjectura Cabbalistica” be not a mystical writer (he himself uses the term without shame), who is?

We hope to see much in this book condensed, much modified, much worked out, instead of being left fragmentary and embryotic; but whether our hope be fulfilled or not, a useful and honourable future is before the man who could write such a book as this is, in spite of all defects.

*****

Since the above was written, Mr. Vaughan’s premature death has robbed us of a man who might have done brave work, by lessening, through his own learning, the intellectual gulf which now exists between English Churchmen and Dissenters.  Dis aliter visum.  But Mr. Vaughan’s death does not, I think, render it necessary for me to alter any of the opinions expressed here; and least of all that in the last sentence, fulfilled now more perfectly than I could have foreseen.

FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE. {337} IN MEMORIAM

On Friday, the fifth of April, a noteworthy assemblage gathered round an open vault in a corner of Highgate Cemetery.  Some hundreds of persons, closely packed up the steep banks among the trees and shrubs, had found in that grave a common bond of brotherhood.  I say, in that grave.  They were no sect, clique, or school of disciples, held together by community of opinions.  They were simply men and women, held together, for the moment at least, by love of a man, and that man, as they had believed, a man of God.  All shades of opinion, almost of creed, were represented there; though the majority were members of the Church of England—­many probably reconciled to that Church by him who lay below.  All sorts and conditions of men, and indeed of women, were there; for he had had a word for all sorts and conditions of men.  Most of them had never seen each other before—­ would never see each other again.  But each felt that the man, however unknown to him who stood next him, was indeed a brother in loyalty to that beautiful soul, beautiful face, beautiful smile,