cond 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labours were in danger of being withdrawn from him, yet he sought none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
Dnyi 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 remaind