“The Platonist,” a Londoner bred at St. Paul’s School, entered Lubbock’s bank as a clerk. He left his desk to teach private pupils and to become assistant-secretary to the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, &c. During his last forty years he lived at Walworth, immersed in Plato and the Platonists, on £100 a year from Mr. Meredith, a retired tradesman. His fifty works include translations of the Orphic Hymns, parts of Plotinus, Proclus, Pausanias, Apuleius, Iamblichus, Porphyry, &c., Plato (nine of the Dialogues by Floyer Sydenham, 1804), and Aristotle (1806–12). “The Spirit of All Religions” (1790) expresses his strange polytheistic creed.
General
Taylor’s book was shown to me this summer…. I find that the world’s future religion is to be founded on a blundered translation of an almost unintelligible commentator on Plato…. Taylor will have no success.
Without staying even to learn the inflexions of Greek words, has plunged to the very bottom of pagan philosophy, taught by the heavenly muse to venture down the dark descent, and up to reascend, though hard and rare.
Thomas Taylor,… the would-be restorer of unintelligible mysticism and superstitious pagan nonsense. All that Iamblichus revealed to Ædesius.
Thomas Taylor, sometimes called “Plato Taylor,” is a name justly entitled to honourable mention in any history of mental speculation. He spent above forty years in an exclusive devotion to what he considered the first and most august philosophy; and is the only modern, since the days of the Emperor Julian or the age immediately succeeding, who has penetrated to its remotest sources, and effected its perfect mastership…. The Platonic Philosophy being strictly and essentially theological—in which, accordingly, all other principles and knowledge become themselves religionised, so to speak—Mr. Taylor adopts it in its fullest extent, with all the old profoundly significant and representative mythology attached to it; and perhaps (I speak with diffidence) in a more absolute and dogmatic sense than even the Platonists themselves intended. As a consequence of this, Taylor looks with coldness and distrust on the principles of Christian theology. He understands Plato thoroughly, but it is quite clear that he has studied the principles of natural and revealed religion through a miserably corrupted and distorted medium. This has led him to throw a gorgeous halo around the Grecian system; and to look at pure and undented truth through a dim and hazy atmosphere.
His translations are very numerous; some rather good, the majority poor, and all anathematized by each successive generation of scholars and reviewers. The principal are “The Works of Plato” (in which Taylor was assisted by Sydenham), and “The Works of Aristotle.” These voluminous contributions to the history of philosophy had some value, not because of their intrinsic merits, but because until lately nothing better had taken their place. They are very carelessly executed, and full of errors. Taylor seems to have regarded it as his life-mission to reproduce in English all that related to the Platonic and Neo-Platonic school. The complete list of his works covers nearly forty translations, on all subjects, from the “Hymns of Orpheus” to the “Golden Ass of Apuleius.” The translation of Plato by Prof. Jowett, completed in 1871, supersedes entirely that by Taylor.
Thomas Taylor, the Platonist, for instance, is really a better man of imagination, a better poet, or perhaps I should say a better feeder to a poet, than any man between Milton and Wordsworth.
Talyor 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 European successors had corrupted; and he rejected the common opinion of an essential antagonism between the Platonic and Peripatetic philosophies, only to resuscitate the forced and fanciful syncretism of the ancient commentators. His style, formed on the Johnsonian model, retained its stiffness to the last. But with an ardour which neither neglect nor contempt could damp, he plodded laboriously on until he had achieved a work never so much as contemplated in its entirety by any of his predecessors. Widely read in America, his works had never much vogue in England, where his frank avowal of philosophic polytheism created a strong feeling against him.
