MEMOIR.

EDWARD STANLEY, Bishop of Norwich, was the second son of Sir John Thomas Stanley, Bart., of Alderley Park, Cheshire, and Margaret, the heiress of Hugh Owen, Esq., of Penrhos, Anglesea. His father was the representative of an ancient branch of the Stanley family, and was succeeded in his title and property by his eldest son, created, in 1839, Baron Stanley of Alderley. Edward, the youngest of seven children, was born on the 1st of January, 1779, at his father's residence in London.

In early years he had acquired a passion for the sea, which he cherished up to the time of his entrance at college, and which never left him through life. It first originated, as he believed, in the delight which he experienced, between three and four years of age, in a visit to the seaport of Weymouth; and long afterwards he retained a vivid recollection of the point where he caught the first sight of a ship and shed tears because he was not allowed to go on board. So strongly was he possessed by the feeling thus acquired, that as a child he used to leave his bed, and sleep on the shelf of a wardrobe, for the pleasure of imagining himself in a berth on board a man-of-war. Nor was this a mere

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MENONE OF EDWARD STANLEY,

MEMOIR

boyish fancy which a few years' experience of the hardships of sea-life might have dispelled. His whole character eminently qualified him for the naval profession. A cheerful and sanguine temper-readiness of decision-fertility of resource-activity and quickness of mind and body--and a spirit of enterprise that knew no danger, no impossibility, no difficulty-could hardly have failed to ensure success in the sphere to which his tastes had been thus early turned. The passion was overruled by circumstances beyond his control, but it gave a colour to his whole after life. He never ceased to retain a keen interest in everything relating to the navy. His memory, though on other points not remarkably good, rarely failed in the minute particulars of this. He seemed instinctively to know the history, character, and state of every ship and every officer in the service. Old naval captains were often astonished at finding in him a more accurate knowledge than their own of when, where, how, and under whom, such and such vessels had been employed. The stories of begging impostors professing to be shipwrecked seamen were detected at once by his cross-examinations. The sight of a ship, the society of sailors, the embarkation on a voyage, were always sufficient to inspirit and delight him wherever he might be.

It is possible that this ardent enthusiasm for a profession from which he was shut out might have been abated, had his education been suited to the profession for which he was actually destined. The reverse was the fact. Instead of the careful training in classics which most boys receive at public schools, the whole of

his childhood and early youth was spent in a succession of removals from one private school or tutor to another, till, on his entrance at St. John's College, Cambridge, in 1798, he found that he had to begin his course of study almost from the very foundations. Of Greek he was entirely, of Latin almost entirely, ignorant; and of mathematics he knew only what he had acquired at one of the private schools where he had been placed when quite a child. This deficiency, now that he was for the first time become his own master, he remedied to a great extent by unremitting exertions. He acquainted himself with the classical languages sufficiently for common purposes, and in mathematics he made such proficiency as to appear as a wrangler in the mathematical tripos of 1802. To Cambridge, in this respect, he always looked back with gratitude as the source to which he owed all the real education that he had enjoyed; and many years afterwards he sent a brief but spirited statement of his own experience of its benefits to a provincial journal, in reply to the well-known attack on that University by Mr. Beverley in 1834.

"I can never," he said on that occasion, "be sufficiently grateful for the benefits I received within those college walls; and to the last hour of my life I shall feel a deep sense of thankfulness to those tutors and authorities for the effects of that discipline and invaluable course of study which rescued me from ignorance, and infused an abiding thirst for knowledge, the means of intellectual enjoyment, and those habits and principles which have not only been an enduring source of personal gratification, but tended much to qualify me from the period of my taking orders to the present day for performing the duties of an extensive parish."

The success which crowned his perseverance at college was the first instance of that power of zealous application by which he was subsequently enabled to contend, in more important spheres, against greater difficulties. But, however earnest his efforts may have been, it will be conceived that they could not easily counteract the effects of the almost entire neglect of eighteen years, backed by the strong indisposition of his natural character to the systematic studies which to most clergymen are at once so useful, so congenial, and, by reason of their previous course of education, so familiar.

Such were the disadvantages under which he entered on the profession in which he was destined henceforth to labour. In other respects it had for him the attraction which it always must possess for a young man of blameless life, simple tastes, and kindly disposition, most especially when those qualifications are combined, as they were in his case, with a strong religious feeling which would in all probability have characterised his career as a Christian sailor no less than as a Christian minister. But it is obvious that, under ordinary circumstances, the clerical calling would not have been deemed his natural vocation; so that the interest which attaches to his course differs from that of most careers which deserve to be recorded. It consists, not, as is usually the case, in the gradual developement of the fitness of the individual for his post, but rather in the gradual surmounting of the obstacles which nature or education had thrown in his way, and the adaptation of gifts to a condition of life for which they would not seem to have been originally designed. We have often

heard from poets and philosophers the truth, sufficiently confirmed by experience, of the misery produced, and the happiness lost, to the world, in the fate of those who have been transplanted from congenial to uncongenial spheres. It may be instructive to dwell on a life which seems an exception to this general rule, to trace how far the struggle was successfully maintained, and how far, out of the seeming discordance of character and situation, good was educed by a resolute will rising above the force of outward circumstances. Nor will the value of the lesson be diminished, if it should appear that the sacred office, in which this struggle was carried on, gained more than it lost from the infusion of elements unlike those which it ordinarily includes.

It was in 1805 that, after three years spent as curate of Windlesham, in Surrey, he was presented by his father to the family living of Alderley; and in 1810 he married Catherine, daughter of the Rev. Oswald Leycester, Rector of Stoke-upon-Tern, by whom he had five children. Alderley was a spot which, as well by its natural beauty as by its hereditary associations, offered great attractions to its new Rector. His own youth indeed had been for the most part spent elsewhere, but he had been taught to look forward to it as his future home.

In the interval between his college life and ordination he travelled for a year in Switzerland, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, from whence he returned at his