With Patriarchs and Prophets: Herbert in Vaughan’s Mount of Olives

Much has been said of George Herbert’s unusually intense literary presence in Silex Scintillans. “There is no example in English literature of one poet adopting another poet’s words so extensively,” Canon Hutchinson memorably observed; and “a reader who knows well both The Temple and Silex Scintillans never comes to the end of the verbal parallels.”¹ “Vaughan seems to have read Herbert so much that his borrowings were often unconscious,” Joseph Summers adds.² Indeed, the words of The Temple flash through Vaughan’s poetry in a manner that seems to imply an ecstatic channeling of a sacred text, analogous with Vaughan’s use of the Bible.³ Sociopolitical commentary generally comes quick on the heels of such observations: Vaughan was among those inclined to portray Herbert as “a prophetic figure,” one “who, as the chief example of pre-revolutionary piety, had somehow anticipated” the mid-century struggle between King and Parliament and “firmly and unhesitatingly declared for Charles and Laud.”⁴ Many have sought carefully to modify the image of Herbert constructed by Vaughan and by his episcopal Anglican contemporaries Barnabas Oley and Izaak Walton. My own examinations here, which focus on Herbert’s presence in Vaughan’s prose devotional manual The Mount of Olives (1652), will be concerned rather to show in some detail how Vaughan experienced Herbert’s influence, helping to clarify what sort of person Vaughan – however improbably – believed Herbert to be. The exploration will I hope be useful for understanding the poetry of Silex Scintillans, so intentionally Herbertian and yet so remarkably different from The Temple.

Both Vaughan’s epistle dedicatory to The Mount of Olives and his reader’s introduction sharply contest the new ecclesiastical regime in Commonwealth south Wales. Vaughan praises his wife’s uncle Sir Charles Egerton, a former Long Parliament member evidently becoming disillusioned with the movement he supported,⁵ thanking him for being one of the few men “left who dares look upon, and commiserate distressed Religion,”⁶ and he offers dry Laudian ripostes that anticipate negative Puritan responses to his publication.⁷ The final words of his reader’s introduction show his classicist penchant for multiple quotation in a bracing synthesis of St. Paul, St. John the Divine, St. Jerome, and George Herbert:

Onely I shall adde this short Exhortation: That thou wouldest not be discouraged in this way, because very many are gone out of it. Think not that thou art alone upon this Hill, there is an innumerable company both before and behinde thee. Those with their palms in their hands, and these expecting them. If therefore the dust of this world chance to prick thine eyes, suffer it not to blinde them; but running thy race with patience, look to JESUS the Authour and finisher of thy faith, who when he was reviled, reviled not againe. Presse thou towards the mark, and let the people and their Seducers rage; be faithful unto the death, and he will give thee a Crowne of life. Look not upon transitorie, visible things, but upon him that is eternal, and invisible. Choose the better part, yea, that part with Saint Hierome, who preferred the poore Coate of Paul the Hermite to the purple and pride of the world.

(p. 141)

Vaughan’s borrowing here from Herbert’s “Frailtie” effectively places Herbert in the company of early Church Fathers and Scriptural authors, and the image of “the dust of this world” rising to “prick thine eyes” has just as deep a relevance to Herbert’s plea for divine assistance against temptations toward worldly glamour as “running thy race with patience” has to the enheartening exhortations of the Epistle to the Hebrews.

Vaughan’s devotional manual gets underway with a sequence of prayers to be used upon arising in the morning, preparing for the day, and leaving home for working duties. As Donald Dickson has observed, Vaughan is providing his dissident episcopal Anglican readers with their own version of a lay Primer or book of private devotion; but here the Primer’s generic focus on sanctifying the necessary cycles of human...