He never deigns to write to me, but in print I doubt whether he has many readers who so much understand, relish, and tolerate him, for which he ought to reward me by some of his manuscript esoteries.’ More may be said of William Taylor. It was he who made Walter Scott a poet. Taylor’s spirited translation of Burger’s ‘Leonore’ with the two well-known lines—
‘Tramp, tramp along the land they rode,
Splash, splash along the sea,’
opened up to Scott a field in which for a time he won fame and wealth.
Of Mrs. Taylor, wife of the grandson of the eminent Hebraist, Mackintosh declared that she was the Madame Roland of Norwich. We owe to her Mrs. Austen and Lady Duff Gordon. Mr. Reeve, the translator of De Tocqueville’s ‘Democracy,’ has preserved the memory of his father, Dr. Henry Reeve, by the republication of his ‘Journal of a Tour on the Continent.’ Let me also mention that Dr. Caius, the founder of Caius College, Cambridge, was a Norwich man.
To Noncons Norwich offers peculiar attractions. We have in Dr. Williams’s library ‘The Order of the Prophesie in Norwich’; and Robinson, the leader of the Pilgrim Fathers, had a Norwich
charge. Even in a later day some of the Norwich divines had a godly zeal for freedom, worthy of Milton himself, and on which the Pilgrim Fathers would have smiled approval. It is told of Mark Wilks, the brother of Matthew, and the grandfather of our London Mark Wilks, that when a deputation went from Norwich during the Thelwall and Horne Tooke trials, when, if the Castlereagh gang had had their will, there would have been found a short and easy way with the Dissenters, and came back on the Sunday morning, entering the place after the service had commenced, that he called out, ‘What’s the news?’ as he saw them enter. ‘Acquitted,’ was the reply. ‘Thank God!’ said the parson, as they all joined in singing
‘Praise God from whom all blessings flow.’
It is a fact that Wilks’s first sermon in the Countess of Huntingdon’s Chapel at Norwich was from the text, ‘There is a lad here with five barley loaves and a few small fishes.’ Let me tell another story, this time in connection with that Old Meeting which has so much to attract the visitor at Norwich. It had a grand old man, William Youngman, amongst its supporters; I see him now, with his choleric face, his full fat figure, his black knee-breeches and silk
stockings, his gold-headed cane. He was an author, a learned man, as well as a Norwich merchant, the very Aristarchus of Dissent—a kind-hearted, hospitable man withal, if my boyish experience may be relied on. One Sunday there came to preach in the Old Meeting a young man named Halley from London, who lived to be honoured as few of our Dissenting D.D.’s have been. He was young, and he felt nervous as he looked from the pulpit on the austere critic in his great square pew just beneath. Well, thought the young preacher, a sermon on keeping the Sabbath will be safe, and he selected that for his morning discourse. The service over, up comes the grand old man. ‘The next time, young man, you preach, preach on something you understand;’ and, having said so, he bought a pennyworth of apples of a woman in the street, leaving the young man to digest his remarks as best he could. Again the service was to be carried on. The young man was in the pulpit, the grand old man below. There was singing and prayer, but no sermon, the young man having bolted after opening the service. I like better the picture of Norwich I get in Sir James Mackintosh’s Life, where Basil Montague tells us how he and Mackintosh, when travelling the
Norfolk circuit, always hastened to Norwich to spend their evenings in the circle of which Mrs. Taylor was the attraction and the centre. The wife of a Norwich tradesman, we see her sitting sewing and talking in the midst of her family, the companion of philosophers, who compared her to Lucy Hutchinson, and a model wife. Far away in India Sir James writes to her: ‘I know the value of your letters. They rouse my mind on subjects which interest us in common—friends, children, literature, and life. Their moral tone cheers and braces me. I ought to be made permanently happy by contemplating a mind like yours; which seems more exclusively to derive its gratifications from its duties than almost any other.’ It was in the Norwich Octagon that these Taylors worshipped. Their Unitarianism seemed to have affected them more favourably than it did Harriet Martineau, whose family also attended there. I remember Edward Taylor, who was the Gresham Professor of Music. But theologically, I presume, the palm of excellence in connection with the Octagon is to be awarded to Dr. Taylor, the great Hebrew scholar. He wrote to old Newton: ‘I have been looking through my Bible, and can’t find your doctrine of the Atonement.’ ‘Last night I