Page:EB1911 - Volume 27.djvu/982

Rh vice-president of St Edmund’s College, Ware, at that time the chief seminary for candidates for the priesthood in the south of England. Since childhood he had been filled with zeal for foreign missions, and he conceived the determination to found a great English missionary college to fit young priests for the work of evangelizing the heathen. With this object he made a great begging expedition to America in 1863, from which he returned with £11,000. St Joseph’s Foreign Missionary College, Mill Hill Park, London, was opened in 1869. Vaughan also became proprietor of the Tablet, and used its columns vigorously for propagandist purposes. In 1872 he was con- secrated bishop of Salford, and in 1892 succeeded Manning as archbishop of Westminster, receiving the cardinal’s hat in 1893. Vaughan was a man of very different type from his predecessor; he had none of Manning’s intellectual finesse or his ardour in social reform, but he was an ecclesiastic of remarkably fine presence and aristocratic leanings, intransigeant in theological policy, and in personal character simply devout.

It was his most cherished ambition to see before he died an adequate Roman Catholic cathedral in Westminster, and he laboured untiringly to secure subscriptions, with the result that its foundation stone was laid in 1895, and that when he died, on the 19th of June 1903, the building was so far complete that a Requiem Mass was said there over his body before it was removed to its resting-place at Mill Hill Park.

VAUGHAN, THOMAS (1622–1666), English alchemist and mystic, was the younger twin brother of Henry Vaughan, the " Silurist." He matriculated from Jesus College, Oxford, in 1638, took his B.A. degree in 1642, and became fellow of his college. He remained for some years at Oxford, but also held the living of his native parish of Llansantfread from 1640 till 1649, when he was ejected, under the Act for the Propagation of the Gospel in Wales, upon charges of drunkenness, immorality and bearing arms for the king. Subsequently he lived at his brother’s farm of Newton and in various parts of London, and studied alchemy and kindred subjects. He married in 1651 and lost his wife in 1658. After the Restoration he found a patron in Sir Robert Murray, with whom he fled from London to Oxford during the plague of 1665. He appears to have had some employment of state, but he continued his favourite studies and actually died of the fumes of mercury at the house of Samuel Kem at Albury on the 27 th of February 1666. Vaughan regarded himself as a philosopher of nature, and although he certainly sought the universal solvent, his published writings deal rather with magic and mysticism than with technical alchemy. They also contain much controversy with Henry More the Platonist. Vaughan was called a Rosicrucian, but denied the imputation. He wrote or translated Anthroposophia Theomagica (1630); Anima Magica Abscondita (1650); Magia Adamica and Coelum Terrae (1650); The Man-Mouse taken in a Trap (1650); The Second Wash; or the Moor Scoured once more (1651); Lumen de Lumine and Aphorisimi Magici Eugeniani (1651); The Fame and, Confession of the Fraternity of R.C. (1652); Aula Lucis (1652); Euphrates (1655); Nollius' Chymist’s Key (1657); A Brief Natural History (1669). Most of these pamphlets appeared under the pseudonym of Eugenius Philalethes. Vaughan was probably, although it is by no means certain, not the famous adept known as Eirenaeus Philalethes, who was alleged to have found the philosopher’s stone in America, and to whom the Introitus Apertus in Occlusum Regis Palatium (1667) and other writings are ascribed. In 1896 Vaughan was the subject of an amazing mystification in the Mémoires d’une ex-Palladiste. These formed part of certain alleged revelations as to the practice of devil-worship by the initiates of freemasonry. The author, whose name was given as Diana Vaughan, claimed to be a descendant of Thomas and to possess family papers which showed amongst other marvels that he had made a pact with Lucifer, and had helped to found freemasonry as a Satanic society. The inventors of the hoax, which took in many eminent Catholic ecclesiastics, were some unscrupulous Paris journalists.

The Magical Writings of Thomas Vaughan were edited by Mr A. E. Waite in 1888. His miscellaneous Latin and English verses are included in vol. ii. of Dr A. B. Grosart’s Fuller Worthies Library edition of the Works of Henry Vaughan (1871). A manuscript book of his, with alchemical and autobiographical jottings made between 1658 and 1662, forms Brit. Mus. Sloane MS. 1741. Biographical data are in Mr E. K. Chambers’s Muses Library edition of the Poems of Henry Vaughan (1896), together with an account and criticism of the Mémoires d’une ex-Palladiste. These fabrications were also discussed by Mr A. E. Waite, Devil-Worship in France (1896), and finally exposed by M. Gaston Mery, La Virile sur Diana Vaughan.

VAUGHAN, WILLIAM (1577–1641), English author and colonial pioneer, son of Walter Vaughan (d. 1598), was born at Golden Grove, Carmarthenshire, his father’s estate, in 1577. He was descended from an ancient prince of Powys. His brother, John Vaughan (1572–1634), became 1st earl of Carbery; and another brother, General Sir Henry or Harry Vaughan (1587–1659), was a well-known royalist leader. William was educated at Jesus College, Oxford, and took the degree of LL.D. at Vienna. In 1616 he bought a grant of land in the south coast of Newfoundland, to which he sent two batches of settlers. In 1622 he visited the settlement, which he called Cambriol, and returned to England in 1625. Vaughan apparently paid another visit to his colony, but his plans for its prosperity were foiled by the severe winters. He died at his house of Torcoed, Carmarthenshire, in August 1641.

His chief work is The Golden Grove (1600), a general guide to morals, politics and literature, in which the manners of the time are severely criticized, plays being denounced as folly and wickedness. The section in praise of poetry borrows much from earlier writers on the subject. The Golden Fleece transported from Cambriol Colchis  by Orpheus jun., alias Will Vaughan, which contains information about Newfoundland, is the most interesting of his other works.

VAULT (Fr. voute, Ital. volta, Ger. Gavolbe), in architecture, the term given to the covering over of a space with stone or brick in arched form, the component parts of which exert a thrust and necessitate a counter resistance. In the case of vaults built under the level of the ground, the latter gave all that was required, but, when raised aloft, various expedients had to be employed, such as great thickness of walls in the case of barrel or continuous vaults, and cross walls or buttresses when intersecting vaults were employed. The simplest kind of vault is that known as the barrel, wagon Or tunnel vault, which is generally semicircular in section, and may be regarded as a continuous arch, the length of which is in excess of its diameter; like the (q.v.), the same provision is required as regards its temporary support whilst the voussoirs constituting one of its rings are being placed in position, for until the upper voussoir, or keystone, is introduced it is not self-supporting. At the present day, when timber of all kinds is easily procurable, this temporary support is given by centring, consisting of a framed truss with semicircular or segmental head, which carries the voussoirs until the ring of the whole arch is completed and is then, with a barrel vault, shifted on to support other rings; in early times, and particularly in Chaldaea and Egypt, where timber was scarce, other means of support had to be contrived, and it would seem that it was only in Roman times that centring was regularly employed.

The earliest example known of a vault is that found under the Chaldaean ziggurat at Nippur in Babylonia, ascribed to about 4000, which was built of burnt bricks cemented with clay mortar. The earliest tunnel vaults in Egypt are those at Requaqnah and Denderah, c. 3500 ; these were built in unburnt brick in three rings over passages descending to tombs: in these cases, as the span of the vault was only 6 ft., the bricks constituting the voussoirs were laid flatwise, and adhered sufficiently to those behind to enable the ring to be completed without other support; in the granaries built by Ramessu II., still in part existing behind the Ramesseum, at Thebes, the span was 12 ft., and another system was employed; the lower part of