Norwich was then “a little Academe among provincial cities,” as Mr. Seccombe calls it; he continues:
“Among the high lights of the illuminated capital of East Anglia were the Cromes, the Opies, John Sell Cotman, Elizabeth Fry, Dr. William Enfield (of Speaker fame), and Dr. Rigby, the father of Lady Eastlake; but pre-eminent above all reigned the twin cliques of Taylors and Martineaus, who amalgamated at impressive intervals for purposes of mutual elevation and refinement.
“The salon of Susannah Taylor, the mother of Sarah Austin, the wife of John Taylor, hymn writer and deacon of the seminal chapel, the once noted Octagon, in Norwich, included in its zenith Sir James Mackintosh, Mrs. Barbauld, Crabb Robinson, the solemn Dr. John Alderson, Amelia Opie, Henry Reeve of Edinburgh fame, Basil Montagu, the Sewards, the Quaker Gurneys of Earlham, and Dr. Frank Sayers, whom the German critics compared to Gray, who had handled the Norse mythology in poetry, to which Borrow was introduced by Sayer’s private biographer, the eminent and aforesaid William Taylor” [no relation of the “Taylors of Norwich”] “whose ‘Jail-delivery of German Studies’ the jealous Thomas Carlyle stigmatized in 1830 as the work of a natural-born English Philistine.”
Nevertheless, in spite of the Taylors and the Martineaus, says William Taylor’s biographer, Robberds: “The love of society almost necessarily produces the habit of indulging in the pleasures of the table; and, though he cannot be charged with having carried this to an
immoderate excess, still the daily repetition of it had taxed too much the powers of nature and exhausted them before the usual period.” Taylor died in 1836 and was remembered best for his drinking and for his bloated appearance. Harriet Martineau wrote of him in her autobiography:
“William Taylor was managed by a regular process, first of feeding, then of wine-bibbing, and immediately after of poking to make him talk: and then came his sayings, devoured by the gentlemen and making ladies and children aghast;—defences of suicide, avowals that snuff alone had rescued him from it: information given as certain that ‘God Save the King’ was sung by Jeremiah in the Temple of Solomon,—that Christ was watched on the day of His supposed ascension, and observed to hide Himself till dark, and then to make His way down the other side of the mountain; and other such plagiarisms from the German Rationalists. When William Taylor began with ‘I firmly believe,’ we knew that something particularly incredible was coming. . . . 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 the sight of the 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 tendencies. One of his chief favourites was George Borrow. . . .”
Another of “the harum-scarum young men” taken up by
Taylor and introduced “into the best society the place afforded,” writes Harriet Martineau, was Polidori.
Borrow was introduced to Taylor in 1820 by “Mousha,” the Jew who taught him Hebrew. Taylor “took a great interest” in him and taught him German. “What I tell Borrow once,” he said, “he ever remembers.” In 1821 Taylor wrote to Southey, who was an early friend:
“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.”