THE intelligence of the death of Mr. R. A. Vaughan, in the autumn of 1857, produced peculiar feelings of disappointment and sadness in the hearts of his many personal and theological friends. He had been known as the author of a volume of poetry, The Witch of Endor and Other Poems, published while a student in the Lancashire Independent College. Subsequently, his papers in the British Quarterly, marked as they were by vast research and chastened imagination, gave his name admission to some of the leading literary circles of England and Scotland. But thus far his reputation as an author was only circumscribed, and it was not until the appearance of Hours with the Mystics that the public became fairly acquainted with him. The work was received with instant attention and favor. A number of the prominent critical periodicals contained commendatory and exhaustive reviews of it, while it created no little stir among the gowned race on the banks of the Isis and the Cam. Not that it was hailed with such enthusiasm as deifies some books that are born in a palace on a bright morning, but die before night by the wayside, and are buried in the potter's field. Denied such an ostentatious natal hour, it was happily spared from a like premature and ignoble grave. Its mission was not to the masses, but to the thinking mind and the feeling heart. The facts it contained had never before been condensed into even a score of works; the style was pure and engaging, the treatment skillful and attractive. The favorable judgments upon it were for the most part from exalted sources; and the author's laurels were of such value that but a tithe of them would have been ample reward for those five years of unremitting labor in languishing health. –The Methodist Review, Vol. 12 [1861]