Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 55.djvu/408

  Reply by Mr. Tayler, Parliamentary Paper, 1880; Pioneer (Allahabad), 4 Aug. 1879; Times, 12 March 1892.] 

TAYLOR. [See also and .]

TAYLOR, ABRAHAM (fl. 1727–1740), independent tutor, was a son of Richard Taylor (d. 1717), independent minister at Little Moorfields, London. His name occurs in a list (December 1727) of ‘approved ministers of the congregational denomination’ in the London district, and in 1728 he became minister at Deptford, Kent. His first publication, an attack on Samuel Chandler [q. v.], appeared in 1729. It was entitled ‘A Letter to a Friend, occasioned by a rhapsody delivered in the Old Jewry by a reverend bookseller [Chandler] … at the shutting up his evening entertainment for the last winter season,’ 1729, 8vo. In 1730 he published a ‘Letter’ in reply to the ‘Enquiry’ into the causes of the decline of dissent by Strickland Gough [q. v.] This attracted the notice of William Coward (d. 1738) [q. v.], who selected Taylor as one of nine preachers for a weekly lecture in defence of Calvinism at Paved Alley, Lime Street. The Lime Street lectures (delivered from 12 Nov. 1730 to 8 April 1731) were collected, 1762, 2 vols. 8vo. While they were proceeding Taylor was ordained (1 Jan. 1731), having been selected as divinity tutor for a new academy, established by the ‘King's head society’ (founded 1730), with an extended course of study (six years), in which more stress was to be laid on orthodoxy than on other learning. In point of attainment Taylor was well suited for the post, but a harsh temper unfitted him for it. He soon had an angry controversy on a minor point of Calvinism with John Gill [q. v.], one of the Lime Street lecturers. When Coward first projected (early in 1735) his scheme of ‘founding a college after his death,’ he wavered between Philip Doddridge [q. v.] and Taylor as its head. He obtained the degree of D.D. about the same time as Doddridge (1736), from what university does not appear. Hugh Farmer [q. v.] writes (14 July 1737): ‘Dr. Taylor is at present the reigning favourite, and is printing twenty sermons at Mr. Coward's request.’ Samuel Clarke [q. v.] and David Jennings [q. v.] deprecated his influence with Coward. Taylor, however, lost character through financial imprudence, ceased to be tutor in 1740, and ended his ministry at Deptford soon after. He died in penury. The place and date of death are not stated.

Among his publications (chiefly sermons) is ‘A Practical Treatise of Saving Faith,’ 1730, 8vo, 3 parts. Appended to his funeral sermon (1733) for John Hurrion [q. v.] is ‘Some Account’ of him, reprinted with Hurrion's ‘Works,’ 1823, 3 vols. 12mo.

[Wilson's Dissenting Churches of London, 1808 i. 212, ii. 530, 1814 iv. 218; Doddridge's Correspondence (Humphreys), 1830, iii. 147, 251, 257; Bogue and Bennett's Hist. of Dissenters, 1833, ii. 218 sq.; James's Hist. Litig. Presb. Chapels, 1867, pp. 664, 690, 712, 715; Calendar of Associated Theol. Colleges, 1887, pp. 47 sq.] 

TAYLOR, ALFRED SWAINE (1806–1880), medical jurist, born at Northfleet, Kent, on 11 Dec. 1806, was the eldest son of Thomas Taylor of Northfleet, a captain in the East India Company's maritime service, by his first wife, Susan Mary, daughter of Charles Badger, manufacturer of gun-flints, a member of an old Kentish family. After being privately educated at Dr. Benson's school, Albemarle House, Hounslow, he was apprenticed in June 1822 to Mr. D. Macrae, a medical practitioner at Lenham, near Maidstone, and in October 1823 he was entered as a student at the then united hospitals of Guy and St. Thomas. He spent the summer of 1825 in Paris, and on returning to London received the anatomical prize at St. Thomas's. On the separation of the hospitals he attached himself to Guy's, studying under Sir Astley Cooper and Joseph Henry Green until 1828, when he received the diploma of the Apothecaries' Society and went abroad to study in the medical schools. In Paris he attended the lectures of Orfila, Dupuytren, and Gay-Lussac; he then spent some time in Auvergne, where he prepared a note on the geology of the Puy de Dôme (published in the ‘London Medical and Physical Journal’ for June 1833); and, having visited Montpellier, reached Naples by sea after a perilous voyage. After a stay of nine months in Naples, where he wrote two papers in Italian on physiological subjects for the ‘Giornale Medico Napolitano,’ February, 1829, he made a journey on foot of 2,700 miles through Italy, Switzerland, the Tyrol, and Germany, visiting the medical schools of Rome, Florence, Bologna, Milan, Heidelberg, Leyden, Amsterdam, and Brussels. On reaching London in 1829 Taylor passed another winter at Guy's Hospital, and became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons in the following March (1830). During a third visit to Paris at the time of the revolution in the summer of 1830, he had the opportunity (at that time a rare one to British students) of seeing gunshot wounds and their treatment on a large scale