1779. Feb. 21.--Edward, son of Sir John Thomas Stanley and Margaret, Lady Stanley, was born in the parish of St. George's, Hanover Square, co. Middlesex, the 1st of January, 1779, and baptized on the 31st of the same month (by the Rev. Ralph Carr, rector of Alderley) at Sir John's house, in the said parish of St. George's. Though born, as it were, to the prospect of taking Holy Orders, Edward Stanley's sanguine temperament, his love of adventure and spirit of enterprise, led him in early years to long for the excitement and the perils of a naval life, a passion that is said to have been inspired by a visit he made, when a child of three or four years, to Weymouth, where he first saw an English man-of-war. Though the boyish fancy was overruled by circumstances beyond his own control, the impression made upon his mind was never eradicated, and his enthusiastic love for a profession from which he was excluded remained and gave a colour to his whole after life. As his son in later years observed, "the sight of a ship, the society of sailors, the embarkation on a voyage, were always sufficient to inspire and delight him wherever he might be." A bright, happy, eager childhood seems to have been his. Of amiable disposition, with a cheerful flow of animal spirits, fertility of resource, activity of mind and body, and an exuberance of boyish mirth and daring, he carried with him into the active business of life those natural characteristics which enabled him, when he had attained to manhood, to overcome whatever difficulties might beset his path--characteristics that were especially useful to him when he entered upon his University career, for it can hardly be said that up to that time his education and training were such as to specially fit him for the sacred calling in which he was to find his vocation, or such as were ordinarily given to boys destined for the Church. His early life was passed in a succession of removals from one private school or tutor to another; subsequently he was placed in the Grammar School at Macclesfield, under the Rev. Dr. Inglis, whose classical attainments had earned for the school a high reputation in the Universities. In 1798 he entered at St John's College, Cambridge, to find, however, that he had to begin his course of study almost from the very foundation. Dean Stanley, in his "Memoirs," to which we are indebted for many interesting particulars of his life, says: "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." His earnest application and indomitable perseverance, however, soon enabled him to make up for these deficiencies, and to make such progress that in 1802 he appeared as 16th Wrangler in the mathematical tripos. Of him it might with truth be said that "he applied his heart to know, and to search, and to seek