er 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