Alexander C. Judson's 1926 article in Modern Language Notes is a short but precisely documented piece of literary source scholarship, identifying a passage in Agrippa's De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum as the direct source for Henry Vaughan's poem "The Ass" in Olor Iscanus (1651). The article is one of the earliest English-language scholarly discussions of Agrippa to appear in a modern academic journal, and it contributes to the documentation of Agrippa's reception in seventeenth-century English literature.

Vaughan's poem is a meditation on the foolishness of human learning, using the ass as a figure of patient, accepting simplicity in contrast to the vain pretensions of the learned. Judson shows that the specific arguments and images in the poem — the comparison between the learned man's vanity and the animal's contentment, the invocation of Pauline theology against worldly wisdom — correspond closely to the parallel passage in De incertitudine, where Agrippa uses the ass figure in the same way. The correspondence is too specific to be coincidental, and Judson demonstrates that Vaughan would have had access to the work through the standard Latin editions or through Henry Care's English translation.

The article is a small but characteristic example of the philological source-tracking that dominated early twentieth-century literary scholarship. Its value lies not in its theoretical ambitions but in the specific connection it establishes: Agrippa's sceptical writings were read by and influenced the poet Henry Vaughan, one of the most important metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century. This connection, together with William Newman's (1982) documentation of Thomas Vaughan's engagement with Agrippa's natural philosophy, shows the brothers' shared intellectual debt to the Nettesheim philosopher across two very different modes of engagement — literary-sceptical and alchemical-practical.