Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 3.djvu/492

 year, to be applied to the increase of the stipend of the reader in Talmudic. In 1886, as vice-chancellor elect, he represented the university at the commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the founding of Harvard, Cambridge, U.S.A., where he received an honorary degree on 8 Nov. From New Year's Day, 1887, to the corresponding date in 1889 he filled with dignity the office of vice-chancellor. On 18 July 1888 {Orationes et Epistolæ Academicæ, pp. 72-75) the vice-chancellor invited more than eighty bishops attending the Lambeth Conference, and nearly seventy other guests, to a memorable banquet in the hall of St. John's. At the end of the year he presented to the university his official stipend of 400l. as vice-chancellor for the year, and the money was spent in providing the nine statues which adorn the new buildings of the university library. Taylor was one of the two university aldermen first chosen in 1889 as members of the borough council; he held the office till 1895. Among further proofs of his generous temper was his gift to the university library of the Taylor-Schechter collection of Hebrew MSS., which, by the energy of Dr. Schechter, the university reader in Tahnudic, and by the generosity of Dr. Taylor, had been obtained from the Genizah of Old Cairo, with the consent of the heads of the local Jewish community (letters of thanks in Orationes et Epistolce Academicce, pp. 250 f.). Taylor and Dr. Schechter published in 1899, under the title of 'The Wisdom of Ben Sira,' portions of Ecclesiasticus from Hebrew MSS. in this collection. In 1907 Taylor presented to the library a fine copy of the 'Kandjur,' which 'at once secured for Cambridge a first place among the repositories of BuddMst texts.' In his own college, the Lady Margaret mission in Walworth, the first of the Cambridge College missions in south London, found in him a generous supporter; he provided the Lady Margaret Club with the site for its boat-house, and sent the boat to Henley; while his gifts to the general funds of the college were constant and lavish.

'He had an intense church feeling, without the slightest appearance of ecclesiasticism,. . . and his moderation, which was no part of a policy, but was natural to the man, was an invaluable quality in the head of a large college containing many varieties of rehgious opinion.' Though reserved and stiff in manner, he was endeared to his friends by 'his practical wisdom, sense of humour, detachment of view, and absolute freedom from petty enmities' (the Eagle, xxx. 78).

He died suddenly on 12 Aug. 1908, at the Goldner Adler, Nuremberg, while on a foreign tour. After a funeral service in the chapel of St. John's College his body was buried in St. Giles's cemetery on the Huntingdon Road, near Cambridge. He married on 19 Oct. 1907, at St. Luke's church, Chelsea, Margaret, daughter of the Hon. Conrad Dillon.

He is commemorated by a stained-glass window placed in the college chapel by his widow. A portrait by Charles Brock of Cambridge belongs to his widow. A bronze medallion by Miss Florence Newman was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1909.

 TAYLOR, CHARLES BELL (1829–1909), ophthalmic surgeon, born at Nottingham on 2 Sept. 1829, was son of Charles Taylor by his wife Elizabeth Ann Galloway. His father and brother were veterinary surgeons in the town. After brief employment in the lace warehouse of his uncle, William Galloway, he apprenticed himself to Thomas Godfrey, a surgeon at Mansfield. He was admitted M.R.C.S. England in 1852, and a licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries in 1855. He graduated M.D. at the University of Edinburgh in 1854, and in 1867 he obtained the diploma of F.R.C.S. Edinburgh. In 1854 Taylor was pursuing his medical studies in Paris. He acted for some time as medical superintendent at the Walton Lodge Asylum, Liverpool, but in 1859 he returned to Nottingham, where he lived during the remainder of his life. In that year he joined the staff of the newly established Nottingham and Midland Eye Infirmary, and his attention was thus directed to a branch of the profession in which he gained renown. A consummate and imperturbable operator, especially in cases of cataract, he soon enjoyed a practice that extended beyond Great Britain. He always operated by artificial light, held chloroform in abhorrence, never employed a qualified assistant, and had no high opinion of trained nurses.

Taylor died, unmarried, at Beechwood Hall, near Nottingham, on 14 April 1909, and was buried at the Nottingham general cemetery. 