STANLEY, THOMAS (1625-1678), English poet and philo sopher, 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 studied both at Cambridge and Oxford, and travelled widely in Europe. Stanley 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 Span ish of J. Perez de Montalvan, in 1647 ; Oronta, the Cyprian Virgin, from the Italian of G. Preti (1650) ; and Anacreon; Bion; Mos chus; Kisses by Secundus . . . a volume of translations, in 1651. Stanley's most serious work in life, however, was his History of Philosophy (3 vols., 1655-61). 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, London, on April 12, 1678.
The English metaphysical school closes with Stanley, who went on weaving his fantastic conceits in elaborately artificial measures far into the days of Dryden and Butler. His History of Philosophy was long the principal authority on the progress of thought in ancient Greece.
Stanley's original poems were imperfectly reprinted in Sir S. Egerton Brydges's edition of 15o copies in 1814. His "Anacreon" was issued, with the Greek text, by Mr. Bullen in 1892.