When documents of this kind reproduce blunders which are pardonable to ignorance alone, and upon a subject about which two opinions are no longer possible, it is certain that such documents are not what they claim; in other words, they have been fabricated, and the fabrication of historical papers is essentially a work of malice.

Furthermore, when such forgeries impeach persons long since passed to their account, on the score of unheard of crimes, they are the work of diabolical malice, and this is a moderately worded judgment on the case now in hand.

Thomas Vaughan, otherwise Eugenius Philalethes, was born in the year 1621 at Newton, in Brecknockshire.

The accepted and perfectly correct authority for this statement is the _Athenae Oxonienses_ of Anthony Wood, but he is not the only authority, and if he be not good enough for Miss Vaughan, she can take in his place the exhaustive researches of the Rev.A.B.Grosart, whose edition of the works of the Silurist Henry Vaughan have probably been neither seen nor heard of by this unwise woman, in the same way that she is ignorant of most essential elements in the matters which she presumes to treat.
The authority of a laborious scholar like Dr Grosart will probably be of greater weight than the foul narrative of a Palladian memoir-maker, who has not produced her documents.

From this date it follows that in the year 1636 Thomas Vaughan was still in the schoolboy period, not even of sufficient age to begin a college career.