Well, Harriet Martineau is not much to be trusted as to Taylor's virtues or his vices, for her early recollections are frequently far from the mark. Thus she refers under the date 1833 to the fact that:
The great days of the Gurneys were not come yet. The remarkable family from which issued Mrs. Fry and Joseph John Gurney were then a set of dashing young people, dressed in gay riding habits and scarlet boots, and riding about the country to balls and gaieties of all sorts.
As a matter of fact, in this year, 1833, Mrs. Fry was the mother of fifteen children, and had nine grandchildren, and Joseph John Gurney had been twice a widower. Both brother and sister were zealous philanthropists at this date. And so we may take with some measure of qualification Harriet Martineau's many strictures upon Taylor's drinking habits, which were, no doubt, those of his century and epoch; although perhaps beyond the acceptable standard of Norwich, where the Gurneys were strong teetotallers, and the Bishop once invited Father Mathew, then in the glory of his temperance crusade, to discourse in his diocese. Indeed, Robberds, his biographer, tells us explicitly that these charges of intemperance were 'grossly and unjustly exaggerated.' William Taylor's life is pleasantly interlinked with Scott and Southey. Lucy Aikin records that she heard Sir Walter Scott declare to Mrs. Barbauld that Taylor had laid the foundations of his literary career—had started him upon the path of glory through romantic verse to romantic prose, from The Lay of the Last Minstrel to Waverley. It was the reading of Taylor's translation of Bürger's Lenore that did all this. 'This, madam,' said Scott, 'was what made me a poet. I had several times attempted the more regular kinds of poetry without success, but here was something that I thought I could do.' Southey assuredly loved Taylor, and each threw at the feet of the other the abundant literary learning that both possessed. This we find in a correspondence which, reading more than a century after it was written, still has its charm.[36] The son of a wealthy manufacturer of Norwich, Taylor was born in that city in 1765. He was in early years a pupil of Mrs. Barbauld. At fourteen he was placed in his father's counting-house, and soon afterwards was sent abroad, in the company of one of the partners, to acquire languages. He learnt German thoroughly at a time when few Englishmen had acquaintance with its literature. To Goethe's genius he never did justice, having been offended by that great man's failure to acknowledge a book that Taylor sent to him, exactly as Carlyle and Borrow alike were afterwards offended by similar delinquencies on the part of Walter Scott. When he settled again in Norwich he commenced to write for the magazines, among others for Sir Richard Phillips's Monthly Magazine, and to correspond with Southey. At the time Southey was a poor man, thinking of abandoning literature for the law, and hopeful of practising in Calcutta. The Norwich Liberals, however, aspired to a newspaper to be called The Iris. Taylor asked Southey to come to Norwich and to become its editor. Southey declined and Taylor took up the task. The Norwich Iris lasted for two years. Southey never threw over his friendship for Taylor, although their views ultimately came to be far apart. Writing to Taylor in 1803 he says:
Your theology does nothing but mischief; it serves only to thin the miserable ranks of Unitarianism. The regular troops of infidelity do little harm; and their trumpeters, such as Voltaire and Paine, not much more. But it is such pioneers as Middleton, and you and your German friends, that work underground and sap the very citadel. That Monthly Magazine is read by all the Dissenters—I call it the Dissenters' Obituary—and here are you eternally mining, mining, under the shallow faith of their half-learned, half-witted, half-paid, half-starved pastors.
But the correspondence went on apace, indeed it occupies the larger part of Robberds's two substantial volumes. It is in the very last letter from Taylor to Southey that we find an oft-quoted reference to Borrow. The letter is dated 12th March 1821:
A Norwich young man is construing with me Schiller's Wilhelm Tell with the view of translating it for the Press. His name is George Henry Borrow, and he has learnt German with extraordinary rapidity; indeed, he has the gift of tongues, and, though not yet eighteen, understands twelve languages—English, Welsh, Erse, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, Danish, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese; he would like to get into the Office for Foreign Affairs, but does not know how.
Although this was the last letter to Southey that is published in the memoir, Taylor visited Southey at Keswick in 1826. Taylor's three volumes of the Historic Survey of German Poetry appeared in 1828, 1829, and 1830. Sir Walter Scott, in the last year of his life, wrote from Abbotsford on 23rd April 1832 to Taylor to protest against an allusion to 'William Scott of Edinburgh' being the author of a translation of Goetz von Berlichingen. Scott explained that he (Walter Scott) was that author, and also made allusion to the fact that he had borrowed with acknowledgment two lines from Taylor's Lenore for his own—
Tramp, tramp along the land,
Splash, splash across the sea.
adding that his recollection of the obligation was infinitely stronger than of the mistake. It would seem, however, that the name 'William' was actually on the title-page of the London edition of 1799 of Goetz von Berlichingen. When Southey heard of the death of Taylor in 1836 he wrote: