Thomas Stanley

“ Form and method, therefore, [xxi] are both, after a fashion, novel, but not without their good inherent justification, nor without fullest obedience of spirit to the author’s individual genius and its posthumous dues. The spelling has been modernised, and particular pains have been taken with the punctuation. This reprint is a deferent attempt to set forth Thomas Stanley as a little latter-day classic, in his old rich singing-coat, made strong and whole by means of coloured strands of his own weaving.
L. I. G.
Oxford, August 31, 1905. ”

“ Alban’s Court, Nonington, near Canterbury. Following the almost unbroken law of the heredity of genius, Stanley derived his chief mental qualities from his mother; and through her he was nearly related to the poets George Sandys, William Hammond, Sir John Marsham the chronologer, Richard Lovelace and his less famous brother; as, through his father, to a fellow-poet perhaps dearer to him than any of these, Sir Edward Sherburne.
His tutor, at home, not at College, was William Fairfax, son of the translator of Tasso. ”

“ His light bright best, his viridaria, have borne victoriously the lava-drift of nearly three centuries. An amorist of even temper and of malice prepense, a railer with a sound heart, an untyrannic master of his Muse, Stanley sings low to his small jocund lyre, and need not be too curiously questioned about his sincerity. How can it matter? He gives delight; he deserves the bays.
This little book is the first complete reprint of Stanley ever published: it is his original and inclusive output. The text is a new text, inasmuch as it represents the Editor’s choice of readings, among many variants ”

“ Thomas Stanley, poet, scholar, translator, and historian of philosophy, occupies a position in literary history, and in the general knowledge of fairly instructed people, which is less unenviable than that of Cleveland, almost equally curious, but more distinctly accidental. In a way—in more ways than one—he cannot be said to be exactly unknown. ”

“ It was thrown at Stanley, afterwards, that in courting the Muses, he had profited only too well by Fairfax’s aid: but the charge, if ever a serious one at all, was absurdly ill-founded. It may have been based on a wrong reading of that very generous acknowledgement beginning: ‘If we are one, dear friend,’ which is printed in this volume; for the muddled misconstruing mind has existed in every intellectual society. Nothing is plainer than that Stanley, both by right of natural genius and of fastidious scholarship, was more than capable of beating his music out alone. ”

“ STANLEY, EDWARD (1779–1849) , bishop of Norwich, second son and seventh child of Sir John Thomas Stanley, sixth baronet, of Alderley Park, Cheshire, and of Margaret Owen, of Penrhos, Anglesey, was born in London on 1 Jan. 1779. His elder brother, John Thomas, was first Baron Stanley of Alderley, and father of Edward John Stanley, second baron Stanley of Alderley [q. v.] Edward's natural inclination was for the sea; but he was not allowed to enter the navy. Educated partly at private schools, partly by tutors, he was sent in 1798 to St. ”

“ A LIST OF EDITIONS OF THOMAS STANLEY’S POEMS AND TRANSLATIONS
[Note.—The present ‘List’ may be looked upon as an apology for a Stanley Bibliography, which, on the present occasion, is an impossibility to the compiler, who has, to some extent, had to satisfy himself with the sparse details of the ordinary bibliographical works; in addition, he has been aided by the Editor of the present edition of Stanley’s Poems.—J. R. Tutin.]
1. [Anonymous lines [*] to Sir John Suckling occurring beneath Marshall’s portrait of him in edd. ”

“ One source from whence we have derived some information, though well known to the comparative few who have explored these by-paths of history, may not be thought uninteresting to the general reader, especially as it is connected with the most eventful portion of our narrative.
An ancient metrical account of the Stanleys, Earls of Derby, is contained in some uncouth rhymes, written about the year 1562, by Thomas Stanley, Bishop of Sodor and Man, [12] and son of that Sir Edward Stanley, who, for his valour at Flodden, was created Lord Monteagle. ”

“ Stanley’s fastidious strength, his wayward but concentrated grace, his spirit of liberty and scorn in writing of love (which was one of the novel characteristic notes of Wither’s generation, and of Robert Jones’s before him) ; the sunny, fearless mental motion, like that of a bird flying not far, but high, seem to our plodding scientific wits as unnatural as a Sibyllic [xvii] intoxication. He strikes few notes; he recognises his limits and controls his range ”

“ Contains twelve photogravures. 1000 copies only were printed for England and America.
[It may be here noted that many of Stanley’s Verse-Translations appeared in his History of Philosophy, of which there are many editions, dating from 1655 to 1743, the best edition of which is said to be the latter.]
19. Anacreon, Translated by Thomas Stanley. With a Preface and Notes by A. H. Bullen, and Illustrations by J. R. Weguelin. London: A. H. Bullen, 47, Great Russell Street, W.C. 1906. Pp. xxiv+92.
20. Thomas Stanley: His Original Lyrics, Complete, in their Collated Readings of 1647, 1651, 1657. ”

“ To name his familiar associates is to call up a bright and thoughtful pageant, for they include, besides Lovelace and Suckling and Sherburne, the Bromes; James Shirley; John Davies of Kidwelly; John Hall of Durham, better remembered now as the friend of Hobbes than as the prodigy his generation thought him; and the genial Edward Phillips, the nephew of Milton. Though Stanley knew how to protest manfully when the profits of his mental labours were in danger of being withdrawn from him, yet he sought none of the usual awards of life, and never increased his patrimony. ”

“ Stanley died at his lodgings in Suffolk Street, Strand, on 12 April 1678, and was buried in the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. His wife Dorothy was daughter and coheiress of Sir James Enyon, baronet, of Flower, Northamptonshire. By her he had a son Thomas, born in 1650, who was admitted a fellow-commoner at Pembroke College, Cambridge, on 6 April 1665, and published in the same year a translation of ‘Claudius Ælianus Various Histories,’ London, 1665, 8vo; this was dedicated, like his father's edition of Æschylus, to Sir Henry (Puckering) Newton [q. v.] ”

“ Stanley’s exemption did not pass unnoticed; and William Fairfax (‘no man fitter!’) is careful to instruct us that Doris, Celinda, and Chariessa were ‘various rays’ of ‘one orient sun,’ and further, that ‘no coy ambitious names may here imagine earthly flames,’ because the poet’s professional and deliberate [xviii] homage was really paid to inward beauty, and never to ‘roses of the cheek’ alone. Here we run up against a sweet and famous moral of Carew’s, which not Carew, but Stanley, bears out as the better symbolist of the two. ”

“ Brown-haired, hazel-eyed, fresh-cheeked, serene rather than gay, he seems the very incarnation of the ideal for which many others, less fortunate, hungered in that vexed England: the man ‘innocent and quiet,’ whose ‘mind to him a [xix] kingdom is,’ whose ‘treasure is in Minerva’s tower,’ and ‘who in the region of himself remains.’ Through the Civil struggle, the Commonwealth, the Restoration, he had followed a way of peace, without blame, and he is almost the only poet of the stormy time who is absolutely unaffected by it. ”

“ Our poet does not appear to have contributed towards the religious literature of a day when the torrent of intense life in human hearts bred so much heaven-mounting spray, as well as so much necessary scum and refuse. But his was a temperament so religious that one almost expects to find somewhere a manuscript volume of ‘pious thoughts,’ the shy fruit of Stanley’s Christian ‘retirements’ at home. ”

“ Sir John Stanley was a natural son of James Stanley, warden of Manchester, and afterwards Bishop of Ely, a younger son of that Thomas, Lord Stanley, who placed the crown of the vanquished Richard upon the head of the victorious Richmond on the field of Bosworth. ”

“ It will be noticed that there is one sad devotional poem in this book, ‘The lazy hours move slow’; and as it appears only in John Gamble’s book, 1657, it may fairly be inferred that it was written later than the other lyrics. In 1657 Stanley was two-and-thirty, and his singing-time, so far as we know, was over. He had discharged it well. He fails where any true artist may ever be expected to fail, in verses occasional and complimentary. ”

“ Choosing the contemplative life, Stanley, [xiii] like William Habington and Drummond of Hawthornden, was shut in with his mental activities, while many others whom they knew and whom we know, poor gay sparks of Parnassus, were dimming and blunting themselves on bloody fields. Like Habington and Drummond also in this, he was, though a passive Royalist, Royalist to the core. ”

“ The Editor’s best acknowledgements are due to Mr. W. Bailey Kempling, for his painstaking copy, from the 1651 edition of Stanley in the British Museum, of a large number of the poems collated in this book.
[1]
LYRICS: THOMAS STANLEY I. LYRICS PRINTED ONLY IN THE EDITION OF 1647.
The Dream.
That I might ever dream thus! that some power
To my eternal sleep would join this hour!
So, willingly deceiv’d, I might possess
In seeming joys a real happiness.
Haste not away: O do not dissipate5
A pleasure thou so lately didst create! ”

“ The pleasure they can still give is inexhaustible, for unconscious genius like theirs, however narrow, is a deeper well than Goethe’s. Cast aside, and contemned, and left in the darkness long ago, the greater number of these English Alexandrians are as alive as the lamp in Tullia’s tomb; and of these Stanley, as a craftsman, is almost first. ”

“ This word reads ‘thy’ in all editions of Stanley. The right reading is almost certainly ‘their.’
57:1. The Self-Cruel (p. 67) .
Entitled ‘Song’: 1647.
57:2. P. 68, line 17. ‘That’ in all texts: but presumably a misprint.
58:1. An Answer to a Song: ‘Wert thou much [?] Fairer’ (p. 68) .
Stanley gives the title inaccurately.
Mr. W. M.’s Wither-like song (the author of which the Editor has not identified) , appears only in the edition of 1651:—
Wert thou yet fairer than thou art,
(Which lies not in the power of art,)
Or hadst thou in thine eyes more darts
Than ever Cupid shot at hearts ”

“ He frequently accompanied Stanley abroad, and was with him in Italy just before his marriage and his decision to accept the deanery of Westminster in 1863; he was present at Stanley's deathbed on 18 July 1881. He declined an invitation to succeed Stanley in the deanery at Westminster, on the ground that he wished to remain what he had always been—a private person. He died, unmarried, on 13 April 1882, and at his funeral in Sonning church, on 18 April, Lord-chief-justice Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, Benjamin Jowett, John Walter, and Professor Goldwin Smith were among the principal mourners. ”

“ He returned to England in the full fury of the great Civil contest (his family having emigrated to France, meanwhile) , and settled down to work, not forensic, but literary, in the Middle Temple. There he fell to editing Æschylus, turning Anacreon into English, and planning the beginnings of his History of Philosophy. ”

“ But the 1647 copy of Stanley in the Bodleian Library, which belonged to William Fairfax, has ‘name’ erased, and ‘fall’ written, in a seventeenth-century hand, above it.
TRANSLATIONS. Claim to Love. Guarini. [1651, 1657] (p. 72) .
60:1. P. 72, line 5. ‘To’: 1651.
60:2. P. ” line 7. ‘Thy’: 1651.
The Sick Lover. Guarini. [1647, 1651, 1657] (p. 72) .
61:1. P. 72, line 6. ‘It’ in all texts, possibly a misprint for ‘is.’
Apollo and Daphne. Marino. [1651] (p. 74) .
62:1. P. 74, line 6. ‘Tears,’ manifestly wrong, in the text ”

“ Poems, by Thomas Stanley, Esq. Quæ mea culpa tamen, nisi si lucisse [sic] vocari Culpa potest: nisi culpa potest et amasse, vocans [sic] . Reprinted from the Edition of 1651. London: From the Private Press of Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown. Printed by T. Davison, Whitefriars. 1814. Pp. xxiv. 107. crown 8vo.
Edited, with Preface, etc., by Sir Egerton Brydges.
The edition contained about 100 copies.
15. Anacreon, Bion, and Moschus, with Other Translations. By Thomas Stanley, Esq. First Printed 1651. A New Edition, with a Preface, Critical and Biographical. ”

“ This is most probably Dorothy Spencer, born Sidney, Countess of Sunderland, Waller’s ‘Saccharissa,’ then a widow: a woman entirely worthy of Stanley’s admiration, and within his circle of personal friends. The Holy Court, a practical and devotional treatise by Nicolas Caussin, S.J., was first translated into English by Sir Thomas Hawkins, and published in London in 1626. There was a fine five-volume edition printed in 1650. A copy of this may, very likely, have been Stanley’s gift. ”

“ Thy growing worth know age, though not decay,
Till thou pay back thy theft, and live to climb
As many years as thou hast snatch’d from Time.
On Sir J [ohn] S [uckling] his Picture and Poems [1646] . [14:1] [22]
Suckling, whose numbers could invite
Alike to wonder and delight,
And with new spirit did inspire
The Thespian scene, and Delphic lyre,
Is thus express’d in either part,5
Above the humble reach of Art.
Drawn by the pencil, here you find
His form; by his own pen, his mind.
Answer [to “The Union,” Poem addressed to Stanley by his Friend and Tutor, William Fairfax] . ”