Takings’ (i. 345), says of Taylor: ‘Large in stature, plain features; a useful preacher; natural temper short and peevish, but subdued by divine grace; with a few drawbacks, a fine specimen of the old school.’ He was a close student, and mastered the original languages of the Bible. He died on 16 Oct. 1816 at Birch House, near Bolton, Lancashire, the residence of his friend Roger Hollond. Two days previously he had preached at Bolton, and his death inspired James Montgomery to write his poem ‘The Christian Soldier.’ While at Chester in 1767 he married the descendant of a French protestant family, by whom he had several children. A portrait of Taylor appeared in the ‘Arminian Magazine’ for April 1780, and another in ‘Wesley and his Successors,’ 1891.
In addition to many separate sermons and tracts, he wrote:
- ‘A New Concordance to the Holy Scriptures,’ York, 1782.
- ‘Ten Sermons on the Millennium, and Five on what will Follow,’ Hull, 1789.
- ‘The Hypocrite tried and cast out,’ Liverpool, 1792.
- ‘A Defence of the Methodists who do not attend the National Church,’ Liverpool, 1792.
- ‘History of the Waldenses and Albigenses,’ Bolton, 1793.
- ‘An Answer to Paine's “Age of Reason,”’ Manchester, 1796.
- ‘Sixteen Sermons on the Epistles to the Seven Churches,’ Bristol, 1800.
- ‘The Reconciler, or an humble Attempt to sketch the Doctrine and Discipline of the Church of Christ,’ &c., Liverpool, 1806.
[Autobiography in Jackson's Lives of Early Methodist Preachers, 1866, vol. v.; Osborn's Wesleyan Bibliography, 1869; Batty's History of Rothwell, 1877, p. 231; Tyerman's Life of John Wesley, 1871, vol. iii.; Green's Wesley Bibliography, 1896, p. 215.]
TAYLOR, THOMAS (1758–1835), Platonist, son of Joseph Taylor, staymaker, of St. Martin's-le-Grand, London, was born on 15 May 1758, and was admitted on 10 April 1767 at St. Paul's school. He was removed after three years, during which he suffered more by the cane than he profited by the classics. Three years later, having meanwhile taken a fancy to mathematics and Mary Morton, daughter of a coal merchant in Doctors' Commons, he was placed at Sheerness, under charge of his father's brother-in-law, who was employed in the dockyard. There he pursued his mathematical studies, besides dabbling in the philosophical essays of Bolingbroke and Hume. Leaving Sheerness in his nineteenth year a complete sceptic, he began to study for the dissenting ministry under Mr. Worthington of Salters' Hall meeting-house, but, on marrying Mary Morton soon afterwards, he obtained an usher's place in a school at Paddington, and eventually a clerkship in Lubbock's bank, which enabled him to take a small house, 9 Manor Place, Walworth. There, in hours stolen from sleep, he grappled with Greek philosophy, inverting the usual order of study by beginning with Aristotle; and read mathematics and chemistry. The latter researches bore fruit in a pamphlet entitled ‘The Elements of a new Method of Reasoning in Geometry applied to the Rectification of the Circle,’ London, 1780, 4to, and in a lamp which was to afford perpetual light, but which on exhibition at Freemasons' Tavern exploded, and all but caused a conflagration. He made friends, however, among them Thomas Love Peacock, Romney the portrait-painter, Bennet Langton (who made him free of his library), and Flaxman, at whose house he delivered twelve lectures on Plato. In quest of a metaphysic of mathematics he passed from Plato to Plotinus and the Neo-Platonists. In their mystical works Taylor discovered the perfect blending of philosophy and religion, and constituted himself their interpreter to the modern world (see bibliographical note infra). His fame reached Paris, and drew thence the neo-Pythagorean ‘philosophe’ De Valadi, who was his guest during the winter of 1788–9. In his house, too, lodged for a while Mary Wollstonecraft, whose ‘Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ he somewhat heavily parodied in his anonymous ‘Vindication of the Rights of Brutes,’ London, 1792, 8vo. Popular rumour credited Taylor with an almost superstitious regard for the numerous pets with which he surrounded himself at Manor Place, and it is not improbable that he had adopted the theory of metempsychosis.
‘An Abridgment of Mr. [Bryan] Edwards's Civil and Commercial History of the British West Indies,’ London, 1794, 8vo, is attributed to Taylor, and was probably but one among other pieces of anonymous hackwork by which he eked out his slender means. Delivered from this drudgery by the generosity of William Meredith, a retired tradesman, who settled an annuity of 100l. upon him, Taylor resigned his clerkship, and obtained in 1798 the post of assistant secretary to the Society of Arts, which he resigned in 1806 in order to devote himself more assiduously to the work of translating and expounding the ancient thinkers. His equipment for this enterprise left much to be desired. Critical faculty he had none. No doubt of the historic personality of Orpheus or the authenticity of the hymns ascribed to him ever crossed his mind; the mystical neo-Pythagorean mathematics he esteemed the true science, which the Arabians and their
