Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 54.djvu/19

 edition to George I on his accession (1714). It was a favourite book in the eighteenth century. Its defect is the neglect of the organic relation of collect, epistle, and gospel; but it contains much that is solid, sensible, and practical in clear and easy language, quite free from controversial bitterness. In the preface Stanhope says that the work was planned for the use of the little prince George, who died in 1700.

Besides the works mentioned above Stanhope published: Stanhope is credited by Todd and Chalmers with the translation of Rochefoucauld's 'Maxims,' which appeared anonymously in 1706; the book seems alien to Stanhope's mind. [Gent. Mag. 1780. p. 463; Todd's Deans of Canterbury; Duncan's Parish Chnrch of St. Mary, Lewisham, and Registers of Lewisham.]
 * 1) 'Fifteen Sermons,' 1700.
 * 2) 'The Boyle Lecture,' 1702.
 * 3) 'Twelve Sermons,' 1726.

 STANHOPE, HESTER LUCY (1776–1839), eccentric, the eldest daughter of, viscount Mahon (afterwards third Earl Stanhope) [q. v.], by his first wife, Hester (1755–1780), the clever sister of William Pitt and elder daughter of the great Earl of Chatham, was born at Chevening, Kent, on 12 March 1776. Hester and her sisters received a rambling kind of education. Their mother was absorbed in her coiffure and in the opera, while their father was too abstracted to take much notice of his household. Hester grew up a beauty of the brilliant rather than the handsome order. She was early distinguished by invincible cheerfulness and force of character, which enabled her to exert a complete ascendency over her sisters. Her home was not congenial to her, and from 1800 until 1803 she lived mainly with her grandmother at Burton Pynsent. Her skill in saving her brothers and sisters from the results of their father's experiments first attracted to her the attention of her uncle, William Pitt, and in August 1803 Pitt asked her to come and keep house for him. She soon became his most trusted confidant, and when in bewilderment at her dazzling indiscretions the minister's friends questioned him as to the motives of his niece's conduct, Pitt would answer, 'I let her do as she pleases; for if she were resolved to cheat the devil she could do it,' to which the lady in telling the story appended the rider, 'And so I could.' She corresponded with Pitt's friends, including Canning and Mulgrave, to whom she once retorted à propos of an unfortunate remark upon a broken spoon at the table, 'Have you not yet discovered that Mr. Pitt sometimes uses very slight and weak instruments to effect his ends?' In 1804, upon one historic occasion, she succeeded in blacking the premier's face with a burned cork, and for the next two years she arranged the treasury banquets and dispensed much official patronage. On his deathbed, in January 1806, Pitt gave her his blessing: 'Dear soul,' he said, 'I know she loves me.' His death involved the extinction of all her ambitious prospects and aspirations.

Pitt desired that 1,500l. a year should be settled upon her, but, after certain deductions, the amount of the pension was reduced to 1,200l., a sum on which Lady Hester declared her inability to maintain a carriage. Her equanimity was further sorely tried in 1808 by the death at Coruna of her favourite brother, Major Stanhope, and of Sir John Moore, for whom she is known to have cherished an affection. She retired for a time to Wales; but, becoming more and more intolerant of the restrictions of ordinary society, she left England for the Levant in 1810, and never again saw her native land. She took out with her a Welsh companion, Miss Williams, an English physician, [q. v.], and a small suite, which gradually grew in numbers as she progressed eastwards. She set sail in the Jason frigate on 10 Feb. 1810. After suffering shipwreck off Rhodes, she made a stately pilgrimage to Jerusalem, traversed the desert, and presided over a vast Bedouin encampment, amid the ruins of Palmyra (January 1813). She finally settled down, in the summer of 1814, among the half-savage tribes on the slopes of Mount Lebanon. The pasha of Acre ceded to her the ruins of a convent and the village of Dahar-June (Djouni or Joon), situated on a conical mount and peopled by the Druses. She there built a group of houses surrounded by a garden and an outer wall, like a mediæval fortress, and occupied herself in intriguing against the authority of the British consuls in the district (for whom as commercial agents she had a supreme aristocratic contempt), in regulating and counteracting the designs of her slaves, in stimulating the Druses to rise against Ibrahim Pasha, and in endeavours to foster the declining central authority of the sultan. Though with the lapse of time and the waning of her resources her prestige suffered considerably, for a few years she exercised almost despotic power in the neighbourhood of Lebanon, and in time of panic, as after the battle of Navarino (20 Oct. 1827), Europeans fled to her from all sides for protection. Her fearlessness and her remarkable insight into character, combined