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 Though Stanley knew how to protest manfully when the profits of his mental labours were in danger of being withdrawn from him, yet he sought none of the usual awards of life, and never increased his patrimony.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.

Stanley was supposed by his contemporaries to have made himself immortal by his History of Philosophy, long a standard book, though hardly an original one. Indeed, they considered him, chiefly on account of it, ‘the glory and admiration of his time’: the phrase is that of a careful critic, Winstanley. The work went into many editions; his prose was used and read, while his verse was talked of, and passed lightly from hand to hand. As in the case of Petrarca, whose fine Latin tomes quickly perished, while his less regarded vernacular Rime rose to shine ‘on the stretched forefinger of all Time,’ so here was a little remainder of lovely English song to embalm an otherwise soon-buried name. Hardly any poet of his poetic day, to be discovered hereafter, can be appraised on a more intimate understanding, or can awaken a more endearing interest. Yet we know that save for one or two of his pieces extant here or there in anthologies; save for a private reprint in 1814 by that tireless scholar and ‘great mouser,’ Sir Egerton Brydges; save for Mr. A. H. Bullen’s valued reproduction of the Anacreontea, in 1893, Thomas Stanley’s name is utterly unknown to the modern world.

We have indeed travelled far from the ideals of the seventeenth century. Perhaps, after all, that is one of our blunders; for every hour, nowadays, we are busy breaking a backward path through the historic underbrush, in order to speak with those singing gentlemen of ‘the Warres,’ whose art and statecraft and religion some of us (who have seen the end of so much else), find incredibly attractive to our own. Their lawless vision, like that of children, and the mysterious trick of music in all their speech, are things we love instinctively, and never can regain. Out of their political storm, their hard thought, and high spirits, they can somehow give us rest: and it is chiefly rest which we crave of them. We appeal to each of these post-Elizabethans with the invitatory line of one of them:

‘Charm me asleep with thy delicious numbers!’

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.

He was a born man of letters; he gave his whole life to meditation, to friendship, and to art; he did his beautiful best, and cared nothing for results; and though literary dynasties have come and gone, his work has sufficient vitality to-day to leap abreast of work which has never been out of the sphere of man’s appreciation, and has deserved all the appreciation which it got. 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 intoxication. He strikes few notes; he recognises his limits and controls his range; but within these, he is for the most part as happy as Herrick, as mellow as Henry King, as free as Carew, and as capable as these were, and as those deeper natures, Crashaw and Vaughan, were not, of a short poem perfect throughout. He is the child of his age, moreover, in that his ingenuity never slumbers, and his speech must ever be concise and knotty. If he sports in the tangles of Neræa’s hair, it is because he likes tangles, and means to add to them. No Carolian poet was ever an idler!

Carew, perhaps, is Stanley’s nearest parallel. The latter shows the very same sort of golden pertness, masked in languid elegance, which goes to unify and heighten Carew’s memorable enchantment, and the same sheer singable felicity of phrase. But, unlike Carew, he has no glorious ungoverned swift-passing raptures; there is in Stanley less fire and less tenderness. Nor has he anything to repent of. His imagination, as John Hall discerningly said of it,

‘Makes soft Ionic turn grave Lydian.’

Except Habington’s, no considerable body of amatory verse in all that century, certainly not even Cowley’s more artificial sequence of 1647, is, on the whole, so free from stain. 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 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. 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