sconstruing 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 AEschylus,
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_ ([Greek: Eikon
Basilike] 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 se