Footnotes:  1.  Langbaine’s Lives of the Poets. 2.  Langbaine, ubi supra.

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Sir Robert Stapleton.

This gentleman was the third son of Richard Stapleton, esq; of Carleton, in Mereland in Yorkshire, and was educated a Roman Catholic, in the college of the English Benedictines, at Doway in Flanders, but being born with a poetical turn, and consequently too volatile to be confined within the walls of a cloister, he threw off the restraint of his education, quitted a recluse life, came over to England, and commenced Protestant[1].  Sir Robert having good interest, found the change of religion prepared the way to preferment; he was made gentleman usher of the privy chamber to King Charles ii. then Prince of Wales; we find him afterwards adhering to the interest of his Royal Master, for when his Majesty was driven out of London, by the threatnings and tumults of the discontented rabble, he followed him, and on the 13th of September, 1642, he received the honour of knighthood.  After the battle of Edgehill, when his Majesty was obliged to retire to Oxford, our author then attended him, and was created Dr. of the civil laws.  When the Royal cause declined, Stapleton thought proper to addict himself to study, and to live quietly under a government, no effort of his could overturn, and as he was not amongst the most conspicuous of the Royalists, he was suffered to enjoy his solitude unmolested.  At the restoration he was again promoted in the service of King Charles ii. and held a place in that monarch’s esteem ’till his death.  Langbaine, speaking of this gentleman, gives him a very great character; his writings, says he, have made him not only known, but admired throughout all England, and while Musaeus and Juvenal are in esteem with the learned, Sir Robert’s fame will still survive, the translation of these two authors having placed his name in the temple of Immortality.  As to Musaeus, he had so great a value for him, that after he had translated him, he reduced the story into a dramatic poem, called Hero and Leander, a Tragedy, printed in 4to. 1669, and addressed to the Duchess of Monmouth.  Whether this play was ever acted is uncertain, though the Prologue and Epilogue seem to imply that it appeared on the stage.

Besides these translations and this tragedy, our author has written

The slighted Maid, a Comedy, acted at the Theatre in Little Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields, by the Duke of York’s Servants, printed in London 1663, and dedicated to the Duke of Monmouth.

Pliny’s Panegyric, a Speech in the Senate, wherein public Thanks are presented to the Emperor Trajan, by C. Plenius Caecilius Secundus, Consul of Rome, Oxon, 1644.

Leander’s Letter to Hero, and her Answer, printed with the Loves; ’tis taken from Ovid, and has Annotations written upon it by Sir Robert.

A Survey of the Manners and Actions of Mankind, with Arguments, Marginal Notes, and Annotations, clearing the obscure Places, out of the History of the Laws and Ceremonies of the Romans, London, 1647, 8vo. with the author’s preface before it.  It is dedicated to Henry, Marquis of Dorchester, his patron.