ESC: English Studies in Canada

sensibility and wit of the love letters of Dorothy Osborne. Such qualities are scarcely to be expected if one considers the almost inevitable limitations of the royal letters. On the one hand, as the editor points out, James does not seem to have regarded them as part of his literary corpus and he did not usually take special pains to polish them. On the other hand, they lack intimacy. There are many secret letters but few with the special attraction of truly private letters, no doubt for the reason that James, who had been a king since infancy, had scarcely known what it was to have a private life. He can write only as a king; when he addresses princes Henry and Charles he writes as a king to his heirs, and when he writes to Carr and Bucking­ ham, however playful or intense his language may be, it is as a king to his favourites. Yet the letters display both range and individuality of style. In an era remarkable for the great variety of personal prose styles James’ characteristic mixture of pungency and pedantry, strings of aphorisms, and flashes of humour or facetiousness is as peculiarly his own as the styles developed by any of his subjects — a fact that has often enabled the editor to distinguish with some confidence letters of the king’s own composition from drafts prepared by the royal secretaries. Among his letters are some, like a terse and forceful epistle to his council in November 1617 on the state of the royal finances, that might well deserve a place in an anthology of that still rather neglected literary form, the seventeenth-century letter. Letters of King James V I & I is a substantial addition to the series of contributions to the study of Elizabethan and Jacobean history and culture made by G. P. V. Akrigg, who for many years before his retirement taught classes in Shakespeare and the Renaissance English drama at the University of British Columbia. His achievement is the more noteworthy in that it has been accompanied by work on a large scale in a completely different field, western Canadian history, which includes (in collaboration with Helen Akrigg) the two indispensable and very readable volumes of British Colum­ bia Chronicle. a l l a n P r i t c h a r d / University of Toronto The Works of Thomas Vaughan, ed. Alan Rudrum, with the assistance of Jennifer Drake-Brockman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). xiv, 761. $142.50 Thomas Vaughan (1621/2-1666) was, by his own account, a writer “borne out of due time.” The nine short books which he published between 1650 and 1655 — and which, together with the Latin poems gathered by his twin 108 brother Henry in Thalia Rediviva (1678) and a scattering of other texts, constitute his literary legacy — identify him as a belated but passionate exponent of Renaissance traditions of alchemy and magic. It is understand­ able that a writer who could proclaim of Cornelius Agrippa, the early sixteenth-century magician and humanist, that “He is indeed my Author, and next to God I owe all that I have unto Him” (84), should have felt himself out of place in the age of Descartes and Hobbes. More surprising to some may seem the notion — which must be presupposed by this edition, despite its prohibitive cost — that such a writer deserves readers in the present century. In his first book, Anthroposophia Theomagica, Vaughan correctly prophe­ sied the reception of his works: “ I know my Reward is Calumnie.” The opinion of one Edward Bolnest that Vaughan’s books “doe contayne . . . strange and strong delusions” may perhaps be discounted on the grounds that Bolnest himself practised the arts both of the alchemist and of the extortioner: Thomas Vaughan, in the latter instance, being the unhappy substance from which his operations succeeded in extracting aurum potabile. More objective is the judgement of another contemporary, inscribed in a copy of Anthroposophia Theomagica, that “ Ego . . . legi et perlegi hunc librum . . . et nihil inveni in eo recte rationi aut veritati Philosophicae consentaneum ” (“I have read and re-read this book. . . , and I have found nothing in it consonant with right reason or philosophical...