Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 54.djvu/95

Stanyan terms of the treaty of Utrecht, upon the conclusion of which in the following year Stanyan returned to England (cf. Stowe MS. 246, ff. 25–8). He now compiled his brochure entitled ‘An Account of Switzerland written in the year 1714,’ destined to enlighten the profound darkness which he found prevailing as to the constitution, religion, and manners of the federated cantons, London, 1714, 8vo (a ‘large paper copy,’ with a dedication to Somers, is extremely rare). The original edition bears no name, and the copy at the Bodleian Library is wrongly attributed to Temple Stanyan (2nd ed. 1756; in French, Amsterdam, 1714 and 1757, 8vo; and translated by Besset de la Chapelle, Fribourg and Paris, 1766, 12mo). A paraphrase entitled ‘L'État de la Suisse’ was added, as a supplementary dissertation, to the second and later editions of Buchat's well-known ‘Délices de la Suisse’ (ed. 1730, vol. ii.). Stanyan's book was used by William Coxe in his ‘Sketches of the Natural, Civil, and Political State of Swisserland’ (1779). It was commended by Lord Chesterfield to his son (Letters, ed. Mahon, i. 68). The Swiss bibliographer G. E. von Haller describes its information as astonishingly accurate (Bibliothek der Schweizer-Geschichte, 1785).

After the accession of George I, Stanyan was on 16 July 1716 appointed envoy extraordinary to the emperor. To enable him to support his diplomatic expenses he was added to the admiralty board, and held office there until April 1717. He had been returned to parliament for Buckingham in 1715, and on his return from Vienna he was in November 1717 appointed one of the clerks in ordinary to the privy council, a post which he resigned in 1719 upon his appointment as ambassador extraordinary to the Porte. At Constantinople he succeeded Edward Wortley Montagu [see ]. He seems to have returned to England early in 1720, when he was succeeded by Sir Everard Fawkener [q. v.], and was soon appointed to one of the clerkships in the privy seal office. Though a whig of old standing and a member of the Kit-Cat Club, Stanyan was on friendly terms with Pope and his circle. He was a subscriber to Pope's ‘Iliad,’ and when he went out to Vienna in the autumn of 1716 he bore a letter from the poet to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. He died at his seat near Buckingham on 11 Sept. 1732. The fine Kit-Cat by Kneller was engraved by Faber in 1733 and by Cook in 1786 (prefixed to vol. v. of the ‘Tatler,’ ed. Nichols).

Abraham's younger brother, (d. 1752), entered Westminster School as a queen's scholar in 1691, and was elected in 1695 to Christ Church, Oxford, where he matriculated on 18 June, aged eighteen, but, like his brother, he does not appear to have taken a degree. He was appointed secretary under Viscount Townshend ‘in the room of Horace Walpole, esq.,’ on 15 Oct. 1715, and continued in his under-secretaryship by Addison on 20 April 1717. On 5 Feb. 1719 he was appointed clerk in ordinary to the privy council in the room of his brother (Hist. Reg. Chronol. Diary, p. 8). Numerous diplomatic letters addressed to him from Paris during the embassy of Sir Luke Schaub [q. v.] are in Add. MS. 22521 passim. He was a good scholar, and in 1735 wrote the Latin inscriptions for the statue of George II at Greenwich Hospital (, Environs, iv. 441); but he is best known for ‘The Grecian History’ down to the death of Philip of Macedon (London, 1739, 2 vols. 8vo; several editions, and a French translation by Diderot, Paris, 1743, 3 vols. 12mo), a compilation which held the field for educational purposes until the appearance of the much larger history by William Mitford the younger [q. v.] Temple Stanyan died at his seat of Rawlins, Oxfordshire, on 25 March 1752. He married as his second wife, on 28 April 1726, a ‘Mrs. Pauncefort.’ He left an only daughter Catherine (she died on 19 Feb. 1801, aged 75), who married Admiral Sir Charles Hardy the younger [q. v.]

[Foster's Alumni Oxon. 1500–1714 (the two Abraham Stanyans are here confused); note from the Warden of New College, Oxford; Gent. Mag. 1732 p. 979, 1752 p. 144; Hist. Reg. 1732, Chronol. Diary, p. 37; Welch's Alumni Westmon. p. 229; Luttrell's Brief Hist. Relation, iv. 454, 518, 524; Boyer's Queen Anne, 1735, pp. 179, 306, 336, 400, 602; Add. MSS. 31130, 31134 (letters to Lord Raby, 1700–1706); Memoirs of Celebrated Persons composing the Kit-Cat Club, 1821, p. 207; Marlborough's Despatches, ed. Murray, vol. iv.; Noble's Contin. of Granger, iii. 180–1; Lady M. W. Montagu's Works; Coolidge's Swiss Travel and Guide Books, 1889, pp. 169–71; Pope's Works, ed. Elwin, iv. 488, ix. 357, 364; Quérard's France Littéraire, ix. 256; Notes and Queries, 1st ser. vol. i. passim; Nichols's Lit. Anecd. i. 299.]

 STANYHURST, RICHARD (1547–1618), translator of Virgil, was born in Dublin in 1547. From the fourteenth to the eighteenth century his family was settled at Corduff, co. Dublin. In 1489 one Richard Stanyhurst was lord mayor of Dublin. Nicholas Stanyhurst (d. 1554), the translator's grandfather, held the same office in 1542; he was interested in medicine, wrote