offered ten thousand dollars to Harvard university for the endowment of a law professorship there, provided Story became the first professor. He accepted the office, and delivered his lectures during the usual law vacation. Deeply interested in the success of the Harvard law school, he resolved in 1845 to resign his judgeship and devote himself to the duties of his professorship. Overwork in clearing off cases before his resignation, brought on the illness of which he died in 1845. He edited several works on law, and his own original legal treatises fill thirteen volumes. Chief among them are his "Commentaries on the Conflicts of Laws," 1834, which is highly prized in Europe; and the "Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States," 1833, the standard work upon the subject; his abridgment of it is used as a text-book in the schools of the States. His "Life and Letters" appeared in 1851, edited by his son, who also collected and republished a volume of his miscellaneous writings; for Story, amid his legal duties, cultivated general literature.—F. E.
STOSCH, Philip, Baron von, the celebrated collector and antiquary, was born at Küstrin, 22nd March, 1691. He studied at Frankfort-on-the-Oder, travelled extensively, and for a number of years acted as English agent at Rome and Florence, where he died November 7, 1757. His principal mission at Rome was to watch the Stewart family. Since his childhood Baron Stosch had been collecting coins, gems, and other curiosities, and by his unremitting zeal he succeeded in forming such a splendid collection, that even Winckelmann thought it worthy of cataloguing (Description des pierres gravées du feu Baron de Stosch, Florence, 1760). Baron Stosch himself published a catalogue of those gems in his collection, which bear the artist's name, Amsterdam, 1724, and by these researches did ample service to the history, of ancient art. After his death King Frederick II. purchased in 1770 his cabinet of gems, upwards of three thousand, and now in the Berlin museum, for thirty thousand ducats. The prints, maps, and drawings, three hundred and twenty-four volumes in folio, passed into the property of the imperial library at Vienna; the casts of ancient gems, upwards of twenty-eight thousand, were bought by Mr. Tassie, and those of modern coins by the prince of Wales for the sum of one thousand ducats.—(See Schlichtegroll, Dactyliotheca Stoschiana, Nuremberg, 1797-1805, 2 vols.)—K. E.
STOSS, Veit, a celebrated old German sculptor and engraver, was by birth a Pole, having been born in 1447 at Cracow, where his father, a German, was settled. Stoss seems to have practised with success as a sculptor in his native city up to 1495, when he removed to Nuremberg. There he carved numerous works in wood; painted several pictures, among others an Adam and Eve for the king of Portugal; and engraved on copper various scriptural subjects designed by himself. He became blind in his latter years, and died in 1542 at the age of ninety-five. Stoss was the contemporary of Martin Schongauer and Albert Dürer, both of whom are supposed to have studied and profited by his works. He has, though less strongly marked, the distinctive characteristics of those masters, his amplitude of drapery especially recalling that of Albert Dürer. His works are extremely rare; of his prints only twelve are known to collectors; Bartsch had only met with three.—J. T—e.
STOTHARD, Thomas, R A., was born in Long Acre, London, on the 17th of August, 1755. His father, who died when Stothard was young, was landlord of the Black Horse in that street. He was early apprenticed to a silk-pattern designer, but meeting with no encouragement in art-manufacture of that class, young Stothard took to drawing for the booksellers—a department of art in which he became eminently successful. His first efforts appeared in the Town and Country Magazine, Bell's British Poets, and the Novelist's Magazine. In 1778 he became a student of the Royal Academy, and in the same year exhibited a picture of "The Holy Family." He continued to combine the occupation of book illustrator and painter for many years. He became an associate of the Academy in 1791, and a member in 1794. In 1813 he succeeded Burch as librarian; and he died at his house in Newman Street, on the 27th of April, 1834, in his seventy-ninth year. Stothard gained more reputation by his illustrations than by his pictures, which, though richly coloured and very gracefully composed, are also often very ill drawn; he trusted too much to memory; his habit of making his small drawings leading him to work without the assistance of models. His designs are very numerous, about three thousand being engraved in various publications. Of his pictures one of the best known and most popular is the small procession of the "Canterbury Pilgrims," engraved by the two Schiavonettis and Heath in 1817. His most important work in painting is the composition of "Intemperance," on the wall of the staircase at Burghley, Northamptonshire, of which the original sketch is in the Vernon collection.—(See the Life of Thomas Stothard, by Mrs. Bray, 1854.)—R. N. W.
STOW, John, the zealous and ill-requited antiquary and chronicler, was born in 1525 in the parish of St. Michael, Cornhill, where his father and grandfather had lived and thriven as members of the company of Merchant Tailors. Stow himself belonged to the same company, and followed the trade of tailor; he complains once to the magistrates of being vilified as "a prick-louse knave." From an early ago, in all probability, he applied himself to the study of English history, and made collections of materials for his works. About 1560 he seems to have given up business, and devoted himself to his favourite pursuits. In 1561 a new edition of Chaucer was published through his efforts—"corrected and twice increased," he says, "through mine own painful labours." In the same year appeared the first edition of his "Summary of the Chronicles of England," of which he printed a new edition probably every year, bringing up the register of occurrences to the latest dates. Of a much larger and more elaborate work, his "Annals," a first edition was published in 1580, and had successors during his lifetime. The most valuable of his works is his "Survey of London," 1598, of which there was a new and enlarged edition by the author in 1603. The edition of 1603 was reprinted (with the variations of that of 1598) by Mr. W. J. Thorns in 1842, with an interesting memoir of Stow, to which the reader is referred. Stow's "Survey" is the basis of all histories of the metropolis. Besides writing these works, Stow was instrumental in effecting the republication of Chaucer, already mentioned, that of the Flores Historiarum, and of Matthew Paris' Chronicle. His last years were spent in deplorable poverty. To such a state was this diligent and useful antiquary reduced by his preference of history to the needle that, at the beginning of 1604, James I. granted him, not a pension, but letters patent, authorizing him, in consideration of forty-five years of literary industry, to collect "voluntary contributions" from his fellow-subjects, to whom the king graciously recommended him. Stow himself, it appears from Ben Jonson's conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden, used to make a joke of his poverty, once "asking two mendicants whom he met what they would have to take him to their order." He died of "the stone colicke," 5th April, 1605. To his edition of the "Survey" Strype prefixed a life of Stow.—F. E.
* STOWE, Harriett Beecher, the author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," was born about 1812, at Lichfield in Connecticut. Her father, Dr. Lyman Beecher, who, by the most honourable exertions, had raised himself from a blacksmith's shop to a position of high repute as a presbyterian minister, was in 1832 made principal of the Lane seminary, established for theological students of that persuasion in Cincinnati. Miss Beecher, who had assisted an elder sister in the management of a school at Hartford, accompanied her father to his new place of abode, and in due course of time married the Rev. Calvin E. Stowe, professor of biblical literature at the seminary. Her first literary achievements were short religious stories written to promote schemes of benevolence. In 1844 she had advanced a step further by the publication of "The Mayflower, or Sketches of Scenes and Characters among the Descendants of the Pilgrims." The seeds of that enthusiasm for the abolition of slavery to which she owes her great fame, were early sown in her mind by her father, and were fostered by her husband, both gentlemen having always been prominent advocates of total abolition. Meanwhile the Lane seminary became a focus of antislavery agitation, and for a certain period there was imminent danger of a violent attack from the mob, and it was feared the professors' houses would be burned down. The result of this agitation was the breaking up of the college, and the removal of Mr. Stowe and his wife to the theological seminary of Andover, Massachusetts. It was in the year of this removal (1850) that Mrs. Stowe began the story which did more in a few months towards the discomfiture of the slavery party, than all the labours of all the students and professors of Lane seminary could have done in years. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was published, chapter by chapter, in a weekly periodical entitled the Washington National Era. On being completed the tale was reprinted, and went rapidly through
