LYRICS: THOMAS STANLEY

Thomas Stanley:

HIS ORIGINAL LYRICS, COMPLETE,
IN THEIR COLLATED READINGS OF
1647, 1651, 1657.

L. I. GUINEY

CONTENTS

[x]

APPENDIX:

[xi]

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[xii] 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,[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. 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[xiv] 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.

[xv]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[xvi] 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[xvii] 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[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. 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. 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. But, to balance this, he is often exceptionally happy when translating.

His portrait, in middle age, by Faithorne after Lely, commends him to us all as quite worthy of the affection and applause which surrounded him from his youth, and never spoiled him. 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. He, at least, need not be discounted as a pathetic broken crystal: he can be judged on his own little plot of ground, without allowances, and by our strictest modern standards. 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; but variants are noted throughout, and by their number and interest tell their own tale of Stanley’s exacting and sure taste. A few translated lyrics are gathered into an Appendix. The title-pages of his few volumes will be found cited in the accompanying List of Editions.

But the only issues taken into account here, for textual purposes, are the three of 1647, 1651, and 1657, of which last a word needs to be said. (The edition of 1652 is an exact copy of 1651, therefore negligible in the[xx] preparation of this book.) The often-overlooked Ayres and Dialogues, Gamble’s and Stanley’s, appeared first privately, in 1656, then in 1657. The earlier issue is rare; it figures in the British Museum Music Catalogues, but not in those of the Bodleian Library. There is at Oxford, however, a copy of the later edition, and on this the present editor bases the readings common both to 1656 and 1657. As a general thing these readings of the Gamble Stanley are particularly satisfying, and besides having all the advantages in point of time, may have profited by the author’s careful revision. John Gamble’s music-book is devoted wholly to Stanley’s poems. It has a notably affectionate and, as it happens, a not-much-too-obsequious Preface, in which Gamble well says that he felt it ‘a bold Undertaking to compose words which are so pure Harmonie in themselves, into any other Musick’; yet that he longed to put it to the test, ‘how neer a whole life spent in the study of Musical Compositions could imitate the flowing and naturall Graces which you have created by your Fancie.’ Gamble wrote out no accompaniments to his sweet and spirited settings, nor did he leave Stanley’s titles prefixed to the numbered songs, a good proportion of which are translations, though not indicated as such.

As to the present arrangement, for simplicity’s sake, it is nothing if not frankly chronological. It is divided into six sections; the sixth contains those poems which must have appeared to Stanley to be his best, as they were included by him in every successive edition of his work. 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.

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.

[4]

II. LYRICS PRINTED ONLY IN THE EDITION OF 1651.

[9]

III. LYRICS PRINTED ONLY IN THE EDITION OF 1657 [JOHN GAMBLE’S AYRES AND DIALOGUES] HAVING NO TITLES.

[12]

IV. LYRICS PRINTED ONLY IN EDITIONS OF 1647 AND 1651.

[24]

V. LYRICS PRINTED ONLY IN EDITIONS OF 1647 AND 1657 [GAMBLE].

[33]

VI. LYRICS PRINTED IN ALL ORIGINAL EDITIONS OF STANLEY.

[71]

APPENDIX

A SHEAF OF TRANSLATIONS.

[85]

TEXTUAL NOTES

1:1. To the Countess of S. with ‘The Holy Court’ (p. 6).

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. The poem, 1651, is preceded by ‘Madam’ in formal address.

2:1. Drawn for Valentine, etc. (p. 7).

The Editor guesses this young lady, the ‘bright dawn,’ who will ‘challenge every heart,’ later, to be the future Marchioness of Halifax, the little Dorothy, daughter of the Earl of Sunderland (who was killed at Newbury when she was three years old), and ‘Saccharissa.’ She was eleven in 1651. Waller, Sedley, and others, have left happier poems addressed to children, in the same forced tone, which was quite characteristic of the time.

‘Dear, fold me once more in thine arms’ (p. 10).

[86]

3:1. P. 10, line 15. A final couplet difficult to scan. If correctly printed, it has a dissyllable rhyme, with the accentual stress on ‘wi’ thee.’

Love’s Innocence (p. 12).

5:1. The Dedication (p. 13).

The Glow-Worm (p. 13).

7:1. To Chariessa (p. 14).

8:1. On Mr. Fletcher’s Works (p. 15).[87]

9:1. To the Lady D[ormer]. Sic 1651 (p. 16).

To Mr. W. Hammond (p. 17).

11:1. On Mr. Shirley’s Poems (p. 18).

12:1. On Mr. Sherburne’s Translation, etc. (p. 20).

13:1. On Mr. Hall’s Essays (p. 21).

14:1. On Sir John Suckling, etc. (p. 22).

15:1. Answer.

The Blush (p. 24).

The Cold Kiss (p. 25).[90]

The Idolater (p. 25).

The Magnet (p. 26).

Song: ‘Foolish Lover’ (p. 28).

The Parting (p. 29).

Counsel (p. 29).

Expostulation with Love, in Despair (p. 30).[91]

Song: ‘Faith, ’tis not worth your pains’ (p. 31).

Expectation (p. 32).

The Breath (p. 33).[92]

The Night: a Dialogue (p. 34).

Unalter’d by Sickness (p. 35).

29:1. To Celia: Excuse for Wishing her less Fair (p. 36).

30:1. Celia, Sleeping or Singing (p. 37).[93]

31:1. Palinode (p. 37).

The Return (p. 38).

Chang’d, yet Constant (p. 39).

34:1. To Chariessa: Beholding herself, etc. (p. 41).

Song: ‘When I lie burning’ (p. 42).

Delay (p. 43).

The Repulse (p. 44).

Song: ‘Celinda, by what potent art?’ (p. 45).

The Tomb (p. 46).

40:1. To Celia, pleading want of merit (p. 48).

41:1. The Kiss. (p. 49).

The Snowball (p. 50).

43:1. The Deposition (p. 50).

Love’s Heretic (p. 52).

La Belle Confidante (p. 54).[96]

The Divorce (p. 57).

The Bracelet (p. 58).

The Farewell (p. 59).

49:1. The Exchange: Dialogue (p. 60).

The Exequies (p. 61).

The Silkworm (p. 62).

Ambition (p. 62).

Song: ‘When, dearest Beauty’ (p. 63).

Song: ‘I will not trust’ (p. 64).

Song: ‘I prithee’ (p. 65).[98]

The Loss (p. 66).

57:1. The Self-Cruel (p. 67).

58:1. An Answer to a Song: ‘Wert thou much [?] Fairer’ (p. 68).

59:1. The Relapse (p. 69)[99]

TRANSLATIONS.

Claim to Love. Guarini. [1651, 1657] (p. 72).

The Sick Lover. Guarini. [1647, 1651, 1657] (p. 72).

Apollo and Daphne. Marino. [1651] (p. 74).

A Lady Weeping. Montalvan. [1651, 1657] (p. 75).

The Hasty Kiss. Secundus. [1647, 1651, 1657] (p. 76).

Translations from Anacreon. [1651, 1657.]

[101]

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.]