June in Seneca Falls (q.v.), whither the Stantons had removed in 1847 from Boston, was held, chiefly under the leadership of Mrs Mott and Mrs Stanton, the first Woman's Rights Convention. She spoke before the New York legislature on the rights of married women in 1854 and on drunkenness as a ground for divorce in 1860, and for twenty-five years she annually addressed a committee of Congress urging an amendment to the Federal constitution giving certain privileges to women. With Parker Pillsbury (1809–1898) she edited in 1867–1870 The Revolution, a radical newspaper, which in 1870 was consolidated with the Christian Enquirer. To the Woman's Tribune she made important contributions, publishing in it serially parts of the Woman's Bible (1895), which she and others prepared, and her personal reminiscences, published in 1898 as Eighty Years and More. With Susan B. Anthony and Mathilda Joslyn Gage she wrote The History of Woman Suffrage (3 vols., 1880–1886). She was president of the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1865–1890. Her daughter, Harriot Stanton Blatch (1856–), also became prominent as a worker for woman's suffrage.
STANYHURST, RICHARD (1547–1618), English translator of Virgil, was born in Dublin in 1547. His father was recorder of the city, and Speaker of the Irish House of Commons in 1557; 1560 and 1568. Richard was sent in 1563 to University College, Oxford, and took his degree five years later. At Oxford he became intimate with Edmund Campian. After leaving the university he studied law at Furniva's Inn and Lincoln's Inn. He contributed in 1557 to Holinshed's Chronicles "a playne and perfecte description" of Ireland, and a history of the country during the reign of Henry VIII., which were severely criticized in Barnabe Rich's New Description of Ireland (1610) as a misrepresentation of Irish affairs written from the English standpoint. After the death of his wife, Janet Barnewall, in 1579, Stanyhurst went to the Netherlands. After his second marriage, which took place before 1585, with Helen Copley, he became active in the Catholic cause. He spent some time in Spain, ostensibly practising as a physician, but his real business seems to have been to keep Philip II. informed of the state of Catholic interest in England. After his wife's death in 1602 he took holy orders, and became chaplain to the archduke Albert in the Netherlands. He never returned to England, and died at Brussels, according to Wood, in 1618. He translated into English The First Foure Bookes of Virgil his Aeneis (Leiden, 1582), to give practical proof of the feasibility of Gabriel Harvey's theory that classical rules of prosody could be successfully applied to English poetry. The translation is an unconscious burlesque of the original in a jargon arranged in what the writer called hexameters. Thomas Nashe in his preface to Greene's Menaphon ridiculed this performance as his "heroicall poetrie, infired . . . with an hexameter furie . . . a patterne whereof I will propounde to your judgements. . . .
Then did he make heaven's vault to rebounde, with rounce robble hobble
Of ruffe raffe roaring, with thwick thwack thurlery bouncing."
This is a parody, but not a very extravagant one, of Stanyhurst's vocabulary and metrical methods.
His son, William Stanyhurst (1602–1663), was a voluminous writer of Latin religious works, one of which, Dei immortalis in corpore mortali patientis historia, was widely popular, and was translated into many languages.
Only two copies of the original Leiden edition of Stanyhurst's translation of Virgil are known to be in existence. In this edition his orthographical cranks are preserved. A reprint in 1583 by Henry Bynneman forms the basis of J. Maidment's edition (Edinburgh, 1836), and of Professor E. Arber's reprint (1880), which contains an excellent introduction. Stanyhurst's Latin works include De rebus in Hibernia gestis (Antwerp, 1584) and a life of St Patrick (1587).
STANZA (Low Lat. stantia, Ital. stantia or stanza), properly an apartment or storey in a house, the term being hence adopted for literary purposes to denote a complete section, of recurrent form, in a poem. A stanza is a strophe of two or more lines, usually rhyming, but always recurring, the idea of fixed repetition of form being essential to it. At the close of the 16th century the word stanza began to be used with an adjective to designate a particular species, as the "Spenserian stanza," because Spenser had invented that nine-lined form for his Faerie Queen; or "Ariosto's stanza" as Drayton described what is now known as ottava rima, because Ariosto had written prominently in it. By "stanzaic law" is meant the law which regulates the form and succession of stanzas. The stanza is a modern development of the strophe of the ancients, modified by the requirements of rhyme. (See Verse; Strophe; Spenserian Stanza.)
STAPLE, a word which has had a curious and interesting development of meaning. The O. Eng. stapul meant a prop or support, and is to be referred to the root seen in step, stamp, &c.; the meaning is also seen in the cognate Du. stapel, stocks, pile, Ger. Staffel, step of a ladder, &c. The application, in current usage, of the word to a loop of wire or metal with two sharpened points used to fix a pin or bolt, or to fasten wire, &c, to wood, preserves the original sense. A special development in Low German of stapel gave the meaning of an orderly arranged heap of goods or stores, hence a store-house in which goods were arranged in a settled order, the idea of firmness or stability being that which runs through the changes of meaning to which the word has been subjected. This Low German word and sense was adapted in Old French as estaple, mod. étape, and applied to an' established market or town, particularly to one which was the centre of the trade in some Specific commodity. Thence the word has in modern -usage been transferred to a principal or chief commodity or article of consumption.
In English economic history the term "staple" was applied to those towns which were appointed by the king as the centres for the trade of the company of the merchants of the staple. These merchants had a monopoly in the purchase and export of the staple commodities of England, viz. wool, woolfels, leather, tin and lead. The merchants of the staple were the origin of all English trading companies. The trade of the staple towns was under the management of a mayor and constables, sometimes appointed by the merchants themselves, sometimes by the mayor of the town and sometimes by the king himself. W. Stubbs (Const. Hist. vol. ii.) dates the growth of the system from the reign of Edward I. The monopolies of the staple were from time to time abolished and restored, but they were consolidated by a statute of 1353, the number and place of the staples being fixed, the custom declared, and the rights and privileges of the merchants confirmed. (See C. Gross, Gild Merchants; W. Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce.)
STAPLEDON, WALTER DE (1261–1326), English bishop, was born at Annery in North Devon on the 1st of February 1261. He became professor of canon law at Oxford and chaplain to Pope Clement V. and in 1307 was chosen bishop of Exeter. He went on errands to France for both Edward I and Edward II., and attended the councils and parliaments of his time. As lord high treasurer of England, an office to which he was appointed in 1320, the bishop was associated in the popular mind with the misdeeds of Edward II., and consequently, after the king fled before the advancing troops of Queen Isabella, he was murdered in London by the mob on the 15th of October 1326. Stapledon is famous as the founder of Exeter College, Oxford, which originated in Stapledon Hall, established in 1314 by the bishop and his elder brother, Sir Richard Stapledon, a judge of the king's bench. He also contributed very liberally to the rebuilding of his cathedral at Exeter.
STAR, the general term for the luminous bodies seen in the heavens; used also by analogy for star-shaped ornaments (see
Medal; Orders and Decorations) or other objects, and figuratively for persons of conspicuous brilliance. The word is common to many branches of languages: in Teutonic two forms appear, starre or sterre (cf. Du. ster), and sterne, or stern (cf. Ger. Stern, and the Scand. stjarna, stjerna, Sec). From Lat. stella, are derived Span. and Port. estrella, and Fr. étoile.
