William Taylor, “of Norwich,” son of a Unitarian Merchant, entered his father’s counting house in 1779, and, sent next year to the Continent, mastered French, Italian and German. The French Revolution indoctrined him with democratic ideas and began the ruin of his father’s business, and Taylor turned to literature. He introduced to English readers the poetry drama of Germany, mainly through criticisms and translations in periodicals, collected in his “Historic Survey of German Poetry” (1828–30). Another work was “English Synonyms” (1813). Borrow’s “Lavengro” describes his philosophy, scepticism, and inveterate smoking; his correspondence with Southey, Scott, Mackintosh, Godwin, &c., is given in the “Life” of him by Robberds (1843).

Personal

  William Taylor was then at his best; when there was something like fulfillment of his early promise, when his exemplary filial duty was a fine spectacle to the whole city, and before the vice which destroyed him had coarsened his morale, and drowned his intellect. During the war, it was a great distinction to know anything of German literature; and in Mr. Taylor’s case it proved a ruinous distinction. He was completely spoiled by the flatteries of the shallow men, pedantic women, and conceited lads…. When William Taylor began with “I firmly believe” we knew that something particularly incredible was coming. We escaped without injury from hearing such things half a dozen times in a year; and from a man who was often seen to have taken too much wine; and we knew, too, that he came to our house because he had been my father’s schoolfellow, and because there had always been a friendship between his excellent mother and our clan. His virtues as a son were before our eyes when we witnessed his endurance of his father’s brutality of temper and manners, and his watchfulness in ministering to the old man’s comfort in his infirmities. When we saw, on a Sunday morning, William Taylor guiding his blind mother to chapel, and getting her there with her shoes as clean as if she had crossed no gutters in those flint paved streets, we could forgive anything that had shocked or disgusted us at the dinner table. But matters grew worse in his old age, when his habits of intemperance kept him out of sight of ladies, and he got round him a set of ignorant and conceited young men, who thought they could set the world right by their destructive propensities. One of his chief favorites was George Borrow, as George Borrow has himself given the world to understand. When this polyglot gentleman appeared in public as a devout agent of the Bible-society in foreign parts, there was one burst of laughter from all who remembered the old Norwich days. At intervals, Southey came to see his old friend.

  William Taylor was one of the liberals of liberal Norwich, and dangled abroad whatever happened to be the newest paradox in religion. But neither his radicalism, nor his Pyrrhonism, nor his paradoxes, could estrange Southey. The last time the oddly-assorted pair met was in Taylor’s house: the student of German criticism had found some theological novelty, and wished to draw his guest into argument; Southey parried the thrusts good-humouredly, and at last put an end to them with the words, “Taylor, come and see me at Keswick. We will ascend Skiddaw, where I shall have you nearer heaven, and we will then discuss such questions as these.”

  Taylor was a devoted son and a generous friend. It delighted him to encourage the studies of young men; George Borrow learned German from him “with extraordinary rapidity” before he was eighteen, and has described him in “Lavengro.” After his losses he cultivated chiefly the society of his juniors; hence Harriet Martineau’s rather harsh judgment that he was spoiled by flattery. He was accused of initiating young men into habits of conviviality; what his censors really feared was the influence of his erratic opinions, but these were not always taken seriously. He was known to argue for an hour in proof that Adam was a negro; no one venturing to reply, he spent the next hour in answering himself and proving that Adam was white.

General

  Mr. Taylor is so considerable a person, that no Book deliberately published by him, on any subject, can be without weight. On German poetry, such is the actual state of public information and curiosity, his guidance will be sure to lead or mislead a numerous class of inquirers. We are therefore called on to examine him with more than usual strictness and minuteness…. Mr. Taylor, in respect of general talent and acquirement, takes his place above all our expositors of German things; that his Book is greatly the most important we have yet on this subject. Here are upwards of fourteen hundred solid pages of commentary, narrative and translation, submitted to the English reader; numerous statements and personages, hitherto unheard of, stand here in fixed shape; there is, if no map of intellectual Germany, some first attempt at such. Farther, we are to state that our Author is a zealous, earnest man; no hollow dilettante hunting after shadows, and prating he knows not what; but a substantial, distinct, remarkably decisive man; has his own opinion on many subjects, and can express it adequately…. The truth is, this “Historic Survey” has not anything historical in it; but is a mere aggregate of Dissertations, Translations, Notices and Notes, bound together indeed by the circumstance that they are all about German Poetry, “about it and about it;” also by the sequence of time, and still more strongly by the Bookbinder’s packthread; but by no other sufficient tie whatever. The authentic title, were not some mercantile varnish allowable in such cases, might be; “General Jail-delivery of all. Publications and Manuscripts, original or translated, composed or borrowed, on the subject of German Poetry; by” &c…. But on the whole, what struck us most in these errors is their surprising number. In the way of our calling, we at first took pencil, with intent to mark such transgressions; but soon found it too appalling a task, and so laid aside our black-lead and our art (cæstus artemque). Happily, however, a little natural invention, assisted by some tincture of arithmetic, came to our aid. Six pages, studied for that end, we did mark; finding therein thirteen errors: the pages are 167–173 of Volume Third, and still in our copy have their marginal stigmas, which can be vindicated before a jury of Authors. Now if 6 give 13, who sees not that 1455, the entire number of pages, will give 3512 and a fraction? or, allowing for Translations, which are freer from errors, and for philosophical Discussions, wherein the errors are of another sort; nay, granting with a perhaps unwarranted liberality, that these six pages may yield too high an average, which we know not that they do,—may not, in round numbers, Fifteen Hundred be given as the approximate amount, not of errors indeed, yet of mistakes and misstatements, in these three octavos?

  His magnum opus, the “Historic Survey of German Poetry,” 1828–30, 3 vols. 8vo., was somewhat belated. It is a patchwork (Carlyle calls it a “jail-delivery”) of his previous articles and translations, with digressions on Homer, the Zendavesta, and other literary gleanings, while the “survey” itself was not brought up to date. But it shows what Taylor had been doing for German studies during a literary life of forty years, and its value is that of a permanent conspectus of his work.

  Taylor of Norwich did more than any man of his generation, by his translations and critical papers in the Monthly Magazine and Monthly Review, to spread a knowledge of the new German literature in England…. Taylor’s tastes were one-sided, not to say eccentric; he had not kept up with the later movement of German thought; his critical opinions were out of date, and his book was sadly wanting in unity and a proper perspective. Carlyle was especially scandalized by the slight space accorded to Goethe. But Taylor’s really brilliant talent in translation, and his important service as an introducer and interpreter of German poetry to his own countrymen, deserve always to be gratefully remembered. “You have made me hunger and thirst after German poetry,” wrote Southey to him, February 24, 1799.

  To the periodicals of the day, he was a toilsome contributor on subjects of foreign literature. He was among the first to introduce German poetry to English readers. He translated the “Nathan der Weise,” and gave a rendering of the ballad of “Ellenore” which found favor in the eyes of Longfellow, and from which Sir Walter Scott derived some inspiration. He also wrote an “Historic Survey of German Poetry,” and a work on English synonyms. His style was quaint, involved, harsh,—no mortal could read him now; but the fact stands that he was read, and not without profit, then.