APPENDIX:
| PAGE | ||
| A Sheaf of Translations: | ||
The Revenge [Ronsard] | [71] | |
Claim to Love [Guarini] | [72] | |
The Sick Lover [Guarini] | [72] | |
Time Recover’d [Casone] | [73] | |
Song: ‘I languish in a silent flame’ [De Voiture] | [73] | |
Apollo and Daphne [Marino] | [74] | |
Song: Torment of absence and delay [Montalvan] | [75] | |
A Lady Weeping [Montalvan] | [75] | |
To his Mistress in Absence [Tasso] | [76] | |
The Hasty Kiss [Secundus] | [76] | |
Song: ‘When thou thy pliant arms’ [Secundus] | [77] | |
Song: ‘’Tis no kiss’ [Secundus] | [77] | |
Translations from Anacreon: | ||
I. The Chase: ‘With a Whip of lilies, Love’ | [78] | |
II. ‘Vex no more thyself and me’ | [78] | |
III. The Spring: ‘See, the Spring herself discloses’ | [79] | |
IV. The Combat: ‘Now will I a lover be’ | [79] | |
V. ‘On this verdant lotus laid’ | [80] | |
E Catalectis Vet[erum] Poet[arum] | [81] | |
Seven Epigrams [Plato]: | ||
I. Upon one named Aster | [81] | |
II. Upon Aster’s Death | [81] | |
III. On Dion, engraved on his Tomb at Syracuse | [82] | |
IV. On Alexis | [82] | |
V. On Archaeanassa | [82] | |
VI. Love Sleeping | [82] | |
VII. On a Seal | [83] | |
| Textual Notes | [85] | |
| A List of Editions of Thomas Stanley’s Poems and Translations | [101] | |
| Index to First Lines | [107] | |
PREFATORY NOTE
Thomas Stanley’s quiet life began in 1625, the year of the accession of that King whom English poets have loved most. He came, though in the illegitimate line, from the great Stanleys, Earls of Derby. His father, descended from Edward, third Earl, was Sir Thomas Stanley of Leytonstone, Essex, and Cumberlow, Hertfordshire; and his mother was Mary, daughter to Sir William Hammond of St. 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. With translation in his own blood, that accomplished and affectionate gentleman succeeded in inspiring his forward charge with a taste for the same rather thankless game, and with a love of modern foreign classics which he never lost. 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.
The boy was sent to Pembroke College, Cambridge, before he was fifteen, and was entered as a gentleman commoner of that University, passing by no means unmarked among a brilliant generation; and there, in 1641 he graduated Master of Arts, being incorporated at Oxford in the same degree. He next set out, like all youths of his rank and age, upon that ‘grand tour’ which was still a perilous business. 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. Best of all, he wrote, at leisure and by liking, his charming verses. Contemporaries not a few practised this same notable detachment, building nests, as it were, in the cannon’s mouth. Choosing the contemplative life, Stanley, 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. His Psalterium Carolinum (Eἰkων Βασιλιkή in metre), published three years before the Restoration, proves at least that if he were a non-combatant for the cause he believed in, he was no timid truckler to the power which crushed it. In London he seems to have lived throughout the war, suffering and surviving in the smallpox epidemic. He had married early, and, according to all evidence, most happily. His wife was Dorothy, daughter and co-heiress of Sir James Enyon, Baronet, of Flore, or Flower, Northamptonshire. (It is curious, one may note in passing, that Thomas Stanley in the Oxford University Register is entered as an incorporated Cantabrigian ‘of Flowre, Northants.’ This was in his seventeenth year, when it is highly improbable that any property there could have been made over to him, unless with reference to his betrothal to Dorothy Enyon, then a child.) One of Stanley’s devoted poetic circle joyfully salutes them on the birth of their second son, Sidney,
‘Ere both the parents forty summers told,’
as equal paragons. ‘You two,’ sings Hammond, ‘who are in worthiness so near allied.’ They enjoyed, together, a comfortable fortune, and gave even more generously, in proportion, than they had received. All Stanley’s tastes and habits were humanistic. He was the loyal and helpful friend of many English men of letters. 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. Indeed, his relative William Wotton said of him long after, in a Latin notice written for Elogia Gallorum, that Stanley lived engrossed in his studies, and let his private interests run to seed. He kept his learning and his liberty, his charity and peace and good repute; and of his troubles and trials he has left, like the gallant philosopher he was, no record at all. A little brass in the chancel pavement of Clothall Church, near Baldock, witnesses to some of these: for there ‘Thomas et Dorothea, parentes moesti,’ laid two little sons to rest ... ‘sit nomen Dñi benedictum.’ They lost other children, later; but one son and three daughters survived their gentle father, when, after a severe illness, he was called away from a society which bitterly deplored him, in April, 1678. He died in Suffolk Street, London, in the parish of St. Martin-in-the-Fields.