Cambridge, Mass., on the 10th of September 1845. His industry was unremitting, and, besides attending to his duties as an associate justice and a professor of law, he wrote many reviews and magazine articles, delivered various orations on public occasions, and published a large number of works on legal subjects, which won high praise on both sides of the Atlantic.
Among his publications are: Commentaries on the Law of Bailments (1832); Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (3 vols., 1833), a work of profound learning which is still the standard treatise on the subject; Commentaries on the Conflict of Laws (1834), by many regarded as his ablest work; Commentaries on Equity Jurisprudence (2 vols., 1835–1836); Equity Pleadings (1838); Law of Agency (1839); Law of Partnership (1841); Law of Bills of Exchange (1843); and Law of Promissory Notes (1845). He also edited several standard legal works. His Supreme Court decisions may be found in Cranch’s, Wheaton’s and Peters’s Reports, his Circuit Courts decisions in Mason’s, Sumner’s and Story’s Reports. His Miscellaneous Writings, first published in 1835, appeared in an enlarged edition (2 vols. in 1851).
See The Life and Letters of Joseph Story (2 vols., Boston and London, 1851), by his son, W. W. Story.
STORY, ROBERT HERBERT (1835–1907), Scottish divine, principal of Glasgow University, was born on the 28th of January 1835 at Rosneath, Dumbartonshire. He was educated at the universities of Edinburgh, St Andrews and Heidelberg. In 1859 he was assistant minister at St Andrew’s Church, Montreal, and in February 1860 was inducted as minister of Rosneath in succession to his father. In 1887 he removed to Glasgow as professor of church history; he had also been appointed in 1886 to a chaplaincy to Queen Victoria. In 1898 he became principal of the university in succession to John Caird. He was moderator of the General Assembly in 1894, and its principal clerk from that year till his death on the 13th of January 1907. Story was a staunch supporter of his Church, and had little sympathy for schemes of reunion with the other Presbyterian communities. He vigorously opposed the action of Bishop Welldon, then metropolitan of Calcutta, in excluding Scottish chaplains and troops from the use of garrison churches in India because these had received episcopal consecration. He was characterized by an absolutely fearless honesty, which sometimes gave offence, but at the basis of his nature there was a warm, tender and sympathetic heart, incapable of meanness or intrigue. In addition to lives of his father (1862), Professor Robert Lee (1870) and William Carstares (1876), he published a devotional book Christ the Consoler; a volume of sermons, Creed and Conduct (1878); The Apostolic Ministry in the Scottish Church (Baird Lecture, 1897), and several pamphlets on church questions.
See Principal Story, a Memoir by his Daughters (1909).
STORY, WILLIAM WETMORE (1819–1895), American sculptor and poet, son of the jurist, Joseph Story, was born at Salem, Massachusetts, on the 12th of February 1819. He graduated at Harvard College in 1838 and at the Harvard Law School in 1840, continued his law studies under his father, was admitted to the Massachusetts bar, and prepared two legal treatises of value — Treatise on the Law of Contracts not under Seal (2 vols., 1844) and Treatise on the Law of Sales of Personal Property (1847). Abandoning the law, he devoted himself to sculpture, and after 1850 lived in Rome, whither he had first gone in 1848, and where he was intimate with the Brownings and with Landor. He died at Vallombroso, Italy, on the 7th of October 1895. He was a man of rare social cultivation and charm of manner, and his studio in Rome was a centre for the gathering of distinguished English and American literary, musical and artistic people. During the American Civil War his letters to the Daily News in December 1861 (afterwards published as a pamphlet, “The American Question,” i.e. of neutrality), and his articles in Blackwood's, had considerable influence on English opinion. One of his earliest works in sculpture was a statue of his father, now in the memorial chapel of Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Mass.; others are “Cleopatra” (of which there is an enthusiastic description in Hawthorne’s Marble Faun) and
“Semiramis” in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York;
the “Libyan Sibil,” “Saul,” “Sardanapalus,” “Judith,”
“Delilah,” “Jerusalem Desolate,” “Alcestis,” “Medea,”
“Electra,” “Nemesis,” “Sappho ” and other ideal figures; and portraits of George Peabody, erected in 1869 in London (a replica in bronze being in Baltimore, Maryland); President
Quincy of Harvard, at Cambridge, Mass.; Colonel Prescott, at
Bunker Hill; Edward Everett, Public Gardens, Boston, Mass.; Chief Justice Marshall, on the west terrace of the Capitol, and Professor Henry for the Smithsonian Institution, Washington; and Francis Scott Key, San Francisco. Among his writings,
in addition to the legal treatises mentioned above, are Life and
Letters of Joseph Story (1851), Roba di Roma (1862), Proportions of the Human Figure (1866), Fiammetta (1885), a novel, Conversations in a Studio (1890), Excursions in Art and Letters (1891), and several volumes of poems of considerable merit. His poems were collected in two volumes in 1885. Among the longer are “A Roman Lawyer in Jerusalem” (a rehabilitation of Judas Iscariot), “A Jewish Rabbi in Rome,” “The Tragedy of Nero” and “Ginevra di Siena.” The last named, with “Cleopatra,” was included in his Graffiti d’Italia, a collection published in 1868.
His son, Julian Story (1857–), the portrait painter, was a pupil of Frank Duveneck, and of Boulanger and Lefebvre in Paris, and became a member of the Society of American Artists, 1892, a chevalier of the Legion of Honour, Paris, 1901, and an associate of the National Academy of Design. He married in 1891 Emma Eames (b. 1867), the operatic prima donna, who secured a divorce in 1907.
See also Henry James, William Wetmore Story and his Friends (2 vols., London, 1903).
STOSS, VEIT (1438 or 1440–1533), German sculptor and wood carver, was born in Nuremberg. In 1477 he went to Cracow, where he was actively engaged until 1499. It was here that he carved the high altar for the Marienkirche, between 1477 and 1484. On the death of King Kasimir IV. in 1492 Stoss carved his tomb in red marble for the cathedral in Cracow. To the same date is ascribed the marble tombstone of the archbishop Zbigniew Ollsnicki in the cathedral at Gnesen; and soon after this he executed the Stanislaus altar for the Marienkirche at Cracow. In 1496 he returned to Nuremberg, where he did a great deal of work in completing altars. His main works are: a relief with the Coronation of the Blessed Virgin in the Germanic museum at Nuremberg, a statue of the Blessed Virgin in the Frauenkirche, the Annunciation in the Lorenzkirche and the circular rosary in the Germanic museum.
STOTHARD, CHARLES ALFRED (1786–1821), antiquarian draughtsman, son of Thomas Stothard (q.v.), was born in London on the 5th of July 1786. After studying in the schools of the Royal Academy, he began, in 1810, his first historical piece, the Death of Richard II. in Pomfret Castle. He published in 1811
the first part of his valuable work, The Monumental Effigies of Great Britain. He was appointed historical draughtsman to the Society of Antiquaries, and was deputed by that body to visit Bayeux-to make drawings of the tapestry. He was made a fellow of the society in 1819, and subsequently engaged in numerous journeys with the view of illustrating the works of D. Lysons. While engaged in tracing a portrait from one of the windows of the church of Beer Ferrers, Devonshire, he fell and was killed on the spot (May 27, 1821). His widow (afterwards Mrs Bray), with her brother, completed his Monumental
Effigies, left unfinished at his death. A biography, by his widow, was published in 1823.
STOTHARD, THOMAS (1755–1834), English subject painter, was born in London on the 17th of August 1755, the son of a well-to-do innkeeper in Long Acre. Being a delicate child, he was sent at the age of five to a relative in Yorkshire, and attended school at Acomb, and afterwards at Tadcaster and at Ilford in Essex. Showing a turn for drawing he was apprenticed to a draughtsman of patterns for brocaded silks in Spitalfields, and during his leisure hours he attempted illustrations to the works of his favourite poets. Some of these drawings were praised by Harrison, the editor of the Novelist’s Magazine, and, Stothard’s master having died, he resolved to devote himself to art.
