Page:EB1911 - Volume 25.djvu/803

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STANLEY, T.
781

Nothing but miles and miles, endless miles of forest." Starvation, fever, the hostility of the tribes, were daily incidents of this terrible march, during which Stanley lost nearly 50% of his men. On the 13th of December Albert Nyanza was reached, and after some delay communication was opened with Emin, who came down the lake from the Nile in a steamer, the two chiefs meeting on the 29th of April 1888. Disquieted by the non-arrival of his rearguard, Stanley retraced his steps, and on the 17th of August, a short distance above Yambuya, found that Tippoo Tib had broken faith, that Barttelot had been murdered, that Jameson (who soon afterwards died of fever) was absent at Stanley Falls, and that only one European, William Bonny, was left in the camp. Collecting those who survived of the rearguard Stanley for the third time traversed the primeval forest, and in January 1889 all that was left of the expedition was assembled at Albert Nyanza. Of 646 men with whom he entered the Congo, but 246 remained. In April the return journey to Zanzibar by way of Uganda was begun, Emin reluctantly accompanying Stanley. On this homeward journey Stanley discovered Ruwenzori (the Mountains of the Moon), traced the course of the Semliki River, discovered Albert Edward Nyanza and the great south-western gulf of Victoria Nyanza. During his stay in the Congo forests he had also obtained much information concerning the pygmy tribes. As to the political results of the expedition, Stanley's proposals to Emin to hold the Equatorial Province for the Congo State or to move nearer Victoria Nyanza and enter the service of Mackinnon's British East Africa Company had not been accepted, but he concluded agreements with various chiefs in the lake regions in favour of Great Britain, agreements which were handed over to the East Africa Company. Zanzibar was reached on the 6th of December 1889 and the expedition was at an end. Stanley's account of it, In Darkest Africa, was published (in six languages) in 1890.

Returning to England, Stanley was received with much honour, among the many distinctions conferred upon him "being the degrees of D.C.L. from Oxford and of LL.D. from Cambridge and from Edinburgh. On the 12th of July 1890 he married a lady whose graceful work as an artist was well known, Miss Dorothy Tennant, second daughter of Mr Charles Tennant, sometime M.P. for St Albans. Later in the year he visited the United States, where he made a pilgrimage to the places where his youth had been spent, and in 1891-1892 went to Australia and New Zealand on lecturing tours. On his return he was renaturalized as a British subject, and—at the solicitation of his wife—he stood at the general election in the summer of 1892 as candidate for North Lambeth in the Liberal Unionist interest, being defeated by a small majority. In 1895 he again stood for the same constituency and was elected, but he had no liking for parliamentary life, and (being also in ill-health) he did not seek re-election in 1900. In 1895 Stanley published My Early Travels and Adventures in America and Asia, in which he retold the story of his experiences with the Red Indians and of his eastern journey of 1869-1870. In 1897 Stanley paid his last visit to Africa. He went to the Cape as the guest of the British South Africa Company, spoke at the opening of the railway from the Cape to Bulawayo, visited the Victoria Falls of the Zambezi and had an interview with President Kruger, of whom he gives a characteristic pen-picture. One result of this journey was Through South Africa (1898), the last of his published works. In 1899 in recognition of his services in Africa he was made a Knight Grand Cross of the Bath. The last few years of his life were spent mainly in retirement on a small estate he had purchased, Furze Hill, near Pirbright. He died at his London residence in Richmond Terrace, Whitehall, on the 10th of May 1904. After a service in Westminster Abbey he was buried at Pirbright on the 17th of May. His widow, Lady Stanley, afterwards married, in 1907, Mr Henry Curtis, F.R.C.S. By Sir Henry Stanley she had a son, Denzil, born 1896.

In geographical discoveries Stanley accomplished more than any other explorer of Africa, with which continent his name is indissolubly connected. Notwithstanding his frequent conflicts with Arabs and negroes, he possessed in extraordinary degree the power of managing native races; he was absolutely fearless and ever ready to sacrifice either himself or others to achieve his object. His books differ widely from the ordinary books of travel. Stanley had a gift of dramatic narrative, and his power of portraiture was remarkable. Curiously, the least successful of his works was the only one which he cast in the form of fiction, My Kalulu, Prince, King and Slave. Another volume from his pen, My Dark Companions and their Strange Stories (1893), is a valuable contribution to folklore.

The Autobiography of Sir Henry Morton Stanley, ed. by his wife, Dorothy Stanley, appeared in 1909. Henry M. Stanley, the Story of his Life . . . (London, n.d. [1872]), by C. Rowlands, contains, notwithstanding many inaccuracies, valuable information concerning his family and early career. The following books may also be consulted: Mrs J. S. Jameson, Story of the Rear Column of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition (1890) ; W. G. Barttelot, The Life of Edmund Musgrave Barttelot . . . (1890); H. Brode, Tippoo Tib, the Story of his Career in Central Africa (1907).

 (F. R. C.) 


STANLEY, THOMAS (1625-1678), English poet and philosopher, son of Sir Thomas Stanley of Cumberlow, in Herts, was born in 1625. His mother, Mary Hammond, was the cousin of Richard Lovelace, and Stanley was educated in company with the son of Edward Fairfax, the translator of Tasso. He proceeded to Cambridge in 1637, in his thirteenth year, as a gentleman commoner of Pembroke Hall. In 1641 he took his M.A. degree, but seems by that time to have proceeded to Oxford. He was wealthy, married early, and travelled much on the Continent. He was the friend and companion, and at need the helper, of many poets, and was himself both a writer and a translator of verse. His Poems appeared in 1647 ; his Europa, Cupid Crucified, Venus Vigils, in 1649; his Aurora and the Prince, from the Spanish of J. Perez de Montalvan, in 1647; Oronla, the Cyprian Virgin, from the Italian of G. Preti (1650); and Anacreon; Bion; Moschus; Kisses by Secundus ... a volume of translations, in 1651. Stanley's most serious work in life, however, was his History of Philosophy, which appeared in three successive volumes between 1655 and 1661. A fourth volume (1662), bearing the title of History of Chaldaick Philosophy, was translated into Latin by J. Le Clerc (Amsterdam, 1690). The three earlier volumes were published in an enlarged Latin version by Godfrey Olearius (Leipzig, 1711). In 1664 Stanley published in folio a monumental edition of the text of Aeschylus. He died at his lodgings in Suffolk Street, Strand, on the 12th of April 1678, and was buried in the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields. His portrait was painted by Sir Peter Lely; his wife was Dorothy, daughter and coheir of Sir James Emyon, of Flower, in Northamptonshire. Stanley is a very interesting transitional figure in English literature. Born into a later generation than that of Waller and Denham, he rejected their reforms, and was the last to cling obstinately to the old prosody and the conventional forms of fancy. He is the frankest of all English poets in his preference of decadent and Alexandrine schools of imagination; among the ancients he admired Moschus, Ausonius, and the Pervigilium Veneris; among the moderns, Joannes Secundus, Gongora and Marino. The English metaphysical school closes in Stanley, in whom it finds its most delicate and autumnal exponent, who went on weaving his fantastic conceits in elaborately artificial measures far into the days of Dryden and Butler. When Stanley turned to prose, however, his taste became transformed. He abandoned his decadents for the gravest masters of Hellenic thought. As an elegant scholar of the illuminative order, he secured a very high place indeed throughout the second half of the 17th century. His History of Philosophy was long the principal authority on the progress of thought in ancient Greece. It took the form of a series of critical biographies of the philosophers, beginning with Thales; what Stanley aimed at was the providing of necessary information concerning all "those on whom the attribute of Wise was conferred." He is particularly full on the great Attic masters, and introduces, "not as a comical divertisement for the reader, but as a necessary supplement to the life of Socrates," a blank verse translation of the Clouds of Aristophanes. Bentley is said to have had a very high appreciation of his scholarship, and to have made use of the