ago.

His foreign journeys, and more especially the first of them, had a large
share in determining the opinions which he afterwards maintained against
great opposition from many of his own class and profession. The sight of
France still smarting under the effects of the Reign of Terror, and of
other countries still sunk in Mediaevalism, helped to make him a Liberal
with "a passion for reform and improvement, but without a passion for
destruction."

He was born in 1779, the second son and youngest child of Sir John
Stanley, the Squire of Alderley in Cheshire, and of his wife Margaret
Owen (the Welsh heiress of Penrhos in Holyhead Island), who was one of
the "seven lovely Peggies," well known in Anglesey society in the middle
of the eighteenth century.

The pictures of Edward Stanley and his mother, which still hang on the
walls of her Anglesey home, show that he inherited the brilliant Welsh
colouring, marked eyebrows and flashing dark eyes that gave force as
well as beauty to her face. From her, too, came the romantic Celtic
imagination and fiery energy which enabled him to find interests
everywhere, and to make his mark in a career which was not the one he
would have chosen.

[Illustration: _Margaret Owen, Lady Stanley.

n. 1742 ob. 1816._]

"In early years" (so his son the Dean of Westminster records) "he had
acquired a passion for the sea, which he cherished down to the time of
his entrance at college, and which never left him through life. It first
originated, as he believed, in the delight which he experienced, when
between three and four years of age, on a visit to the seaport of
Weymouth; and long afterwards he retained a vivid recollection of the
point where he caught the first sight of a ship, and shed tears because
he was not allowed to go on board. So strongly was he possessed by the
feeling thus acquired, that as a child he used to leave his bed and
sleep on the shelf of a wardrobe, for the pleasure of imagining himself
in a berth on board a man-of-war.... The passion was overruled by
circumstances beyond his control, but it gave a colour to his whole
after-life. He never ceased to retain a keen interest in everything
relating to the navy.... He seemed instinctively to know the history,
character, and state of every ship and every officer in the service. Old
naval captains were often astonished at finding in him a more accurate
knowledge than their own of when, where, how, and under whom, such and