little by the egotism pardonable in a poet and the garrulity natural to a veteran, is in the main a pleasing and faithful picture of an aspiring youth, an active maturity, and a happy and honoured old age.
Taylor's Artevelde cannot fail to impress those who read it as the work of a poet of considerable distinction; but, perhaps for the very reason that he was so prominent as a state official, he has not been accepted by the world as more than a very accomplished man of letters. His lyrical work is in general laboriously artificial, but he produced two well-known songs—"Quoth tongue of neither maid nor wife" and "If I had the wings of a dove."
Taylor's Autobiography (2 vols. 1885) should be supplemented by his Correspondence (1888), edited by Edward Dowden. His Works were collected in five volumes in 1877-78.
TAYLOR, ISAAC (1787-1865), English author, son of Isaac Taylor (1750-1829), engraver and author, was born at Lavenham, Suffolk, on the 17th of August 1787. He was trained by his father to be an engraver, but early adopted literature as a profession. From 1824, the year of his marriage, he lived a busy but uneventful life at Stanford Rivers, near Ongar, Essex, where he died on the 28th of June 1865. His attention was drawn to the study of the fathers of the church through reading the works of Sulpicius Severus, which he had picked up at a bookstall. He published a History of the Transmission of Ancient Books to Modern Times (1827), a study in biblical criticism, and some other works, but he attracted little notice until, in 1829, he published anonymously a book bearing upon the religious and political problems of the day, entitled The Natural History of Enthusiasm, which speedily ran through eight or nine editions. Fanaticism (1833), Spiritual Despotism (1835), Saturday Evening (1832), and The Physical Theory of Another Life (1836), all commanded a large circulation. In his Ancient Christianity (1839-46), a series of dissertations in reply to the "Tracts for the Times," Taylor maintained that the Christian church of the 4th century should not be regarded as embodying the doctrine and practice of the apostles because it was then already corrupted by contact with pagan superstition. The book met with great opposition, but Taylor did not follow up the controversy.
Among his other works may be mentioned biographies of Ignatius Loyola (1849) and John Wesley (1851); a volume entitled The Restoration of Belief (1855); and a course of lectures on The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry (1861).
TAYLOR, ISAAC (1829-1901), English philologist, eldest son of the preceding, was born at Stanford Rivers, 2nd May 1829. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and took the mathematical tripos in 1853. His interests, however, were linguistic rather than mathematical, and his earliest publication was a translation from the German of W. A. Becker's Charicles. Though of Nonconformist stock, Isaac Taylor joined the Church of England, and in 1857 was ordained to a country curacy. In 1860 he published The Liturgy of the Dissenters, an appeal for the revision of the Book of Common Prayer "on Protestant lines," "as expedient for the material interests of the Church, and as an act of plain justice to the Dissenters." His studies in local etymology bore fruit in Words and Places in Etymological Illustration of History, Ethnology and Geography (1864). Between 1865 and 1869, when he was in charge of a Bethnal Green parish, his philological studies were laid aside, and he published only The Burden of the Poor and The Family Pen, a record of the literary work of his own family, the Taylors of Ongar. In 1869 he became incumbent of a church at Twickenham, and used his comparative leisure to produce his Etruscan Researches (1874), in which he contended for the Ugrian origin of the Etruscan language. In 1875 he was presented to the rectory of Settrington, Yorkshire, and began his systematic researches into the origin of the alphabet. His Greeks and Goths; a Study on the Runes (1879), in which he suggested that the runes were of Greek origin, led to a good deal of controversy. His most important work is The Alphabet, an Account of the Origin and Development of Letters (1883; new and revised edition 1899). Taylor points out that alphabetical changes are the result of evolution taking place in accordance with fixed laws. "Epigraphy and palaeography may claim, no less than philology or biology, to be ranked among the inductive sciences." He was largely indebted to the Egyptian researches of Rougé, which it has since become necessary to reconsider in the light of discoveries in Crete. In 1885 Taylor became canon of York, and two years later dean. His paper on the Origin of the Aryans, read at the British Association in 1887, was afterwards expanded into a book. In the following winter he visited Egypt, and his letters from there, collected under the title Leaves from an Egyptian Notebook, aroused considerable controversy from the extremely favourable view he took of the Mahommedan religion. For the last few years of his life Dean Taylor suffered from ill health, and was laid aside from active work for some time before his death in October 1901.
TAYLOR, JEREMY (1613-1667), English divine and author, was baptized at Cambridge on the 15th of August 1613. His father, Nathaniel, though a barber, was a man of some education, for Jeremy was “solely grounded in grammar and mathematics” by him. The tradition that he was descended from Dr Rowland Taylor, Cranmer's chaplain, who suffered martyrdom under Mary, is grounded on the untrustworthy evidence of a certain Lady Wray, said to have been a granddaughter of Jeremy Taylor. She supplied Bishop Heber in 1732 with other biographical data of doubtful authenticity. Jeremy Taylor was a pupil of Thomas Lovering, at the newly founded Perse grammar school. Lovering is first mentioned as master in 1619, so that Taylor probably spent seven years at the school before he was entered at Gonville and Caius College as a sizar in 1626,[1] eighteen months after Milton had entered Christ's, and while George Herbert was public orator and Edmund Waller and Thomas Fuller were undergraduates of the university. He was elected a Perse scholar in 1628, and fellow of his college in 1633, but the best evidence of his diligence as a student is the enormous learning of which he showed so easy a command in after years. In 1633, although still below the canonical age, he took holy orders, and, accepting the invitation of Thomas Risden, a former fellow-student, to supply his place for a short time as lecturer in St Paul's, he at once attracted attention by his eloquence and by his handsome face. Archbishop Laud sent for Taylor to preach before him at Lambeth, and took the young man under his special protection. Taylor did not vacate his fellowship at Cambridge before 1636, but he spent, apparently, much of his time in London, for Laud desired that his “mighty parts should be afforded better opportunities of study and improvement than a course of constant preaching would allow of.” In November 1635 he had been nominated by Laud to a fellowship at All Souls, Oxford, where, says Wood (Athen. Oxon., Ed. Bliss, iii. 781), love and admiration still waited on him. He seems, however, to have spent little time there. He became chaplain to his patron the archbishop, and chaplain in ordinary to Charles I. At Oxford William Chillingworth was then busy with his great work, The Religion of Protestants, and it is possible that by intercourse with him Taylor's mind may have been turned towards the liberal movement of his age. After two years in Oxford, he was presented, in March 1638, by Juxon, bishop of London, to the rectory of Uppingham, in Rutlandshire. In the next year he married Phoebe Langsdale, by whom he had six children, the eldest of whom died at Uppingham in 1642. In the autumn of the same year he was appointed to preach in St Mary's on the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, and apparently used the occasion to clear himself of a suspicion, which, however, haunted him through life, of a secret leaning to the Romish communion. This suspicion seems to have arisen chiefly from his intimacy with Christopher Davenport, better known as Francis a Sancta Clara, a learned Franciscan friar who became chaplain to Queen
- ↑ An obviously erroneous entry in the Admission Book states that he had been at school under Mr. Lovering for ten years, and was in his fifteenth year. Admissions to Gonville and Caius College (ed. J. Venn, 1887).
