Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 55.djvu/481

 at Weimar. That Taylor saw Goethe seems rightly inferred by Robberds (Herzfeld leaves it in doubt); his own letters at this period have not been preserved. At Leipzig he rejoined Casenave, with whom he visited Berlin and Dresden. They were on the way to St. Petersburg, but finding at Pillau a vessel bound for Yarmouth, they took passage, and after a perilous voyage, reached Norwich on 17 Nov. 1782.

In May and June 1784 Taylor was in Scotland with Sayers, who had begun his studies at Edinburgh in the previous October (the date is wrongly given in his ‘Life of Sayers’). At Edinburgh he met (Sir) James Mackintosh [q. v.] With Sayers he travelled in the highlands as far as Loch Tay. Business affairs now occupied him, but he found time to learn Spanish. A second journey to Edinburgh in 1788 was due to a nervous breakdown in the health of Sayers, whom he took to the English lakes.

The centenary of the landing of William III was celebrated by a dinner in Norwich (November 1788); a year later, on the formation of a ‘revolution society,’ the elder Taylor was made secretary, ‘gratifying at once his taste for convivial pleasures and his attachment to the cause;’ his son did the correspondence and wrote political letters, with various signatures, to friendly journals. In 1790 he went over to France; on 9 May he ‘kissed the earth on the land of liberty’ at Calais; on 13 May he reached Paris, and eagerly attended the debates in the national assembly. He returned in June; the ‘revolution society’ was soon dropped under fear of repressive measures (with filial concern Taylor wrote ‘junior’ after his father's signatures to the minutes); but before the end of 1790 two new clubs were formed in Norwich, of which Taylor became a member, the ‘Tusculan’ for political, the ‘Speculative,’ founded by William Enfield [q. v.] for philosophical debate. Hitherto he had been engaged (since 1783) in his father's business, and had been taken into partnership with Casenave in 1786. The disturbed state of the continent being unfavourable to the prospects of their trade, he persuaded his father to retire on the fortune already made. The firm was dissolved in 1791; his father employed part of his capital in underwriting, not very successfully. Resisting his father's wish to put him into a London bank, Taylor gave himself henceforth to literature. He had already completed the three poetic translations which secured the recognition of his power to present German poetry in an English dress.

Herzfeld assigns to him a stirring song, ‘The Trumpet of Liberty,’ with the refrain ‘Fall, tyrants, fall,’ which was first published in the ‘Norfolk Chronicle’ on 16 July 1791, having been sung on 14 July at a dinner commemorating the fall of the Bastille. Edward Taylor [q. v.] rightly claims both words and music for the frequent singer of the song, his father, John Taylor (1750–1826) [q. v.]; he gives 1788 (meaning apparently 1789) as the date of its composition (Hymns and Miscellaneous Poems, 1863, pp. 151, 153).

Taylor's name was made by his translation of Bürger's ‘Lenore’ into English ballad metre. This was written in 1790, and bore the title ‘Lenora.’ He submitted it to his friend Benzler (then of Wernigerode), whose society he had enjoyed at Detmold. A previous version had been made in 1782 by Henry James Pye [q. v.], but was not published till 1795, and was unknown to Taylor. His own translation, circulated in manuscript, was made the foundation of a ballad (1791) by John Aikin (1747–1822) [q. v.], and was read by Mrs. Barbauld in 1794 at a literary gathering in the house of Dugald Stewart [q. v.] in Edinburgh. Stewart's brother-in-law, George Cranstoun (Lord Corehouse) [q. v.] gave his recollection of it to (Sir) Walter Scott [q. v.], including the lines Tramp, tramp, across the land they speed Splash, splash, across the sea. These (though the second is an addition to the original) were incorporated by Scott in his own version (1796) of the poem, entitled ‘William and Helen.’ The circumstances are detailed by Scott in a letter to Taylor (25 Nov. 1796). Scott follows him also in transferring, with advantage, the scene of the poem from the seven years' war to the period of the crusades. Much later Mrs. Barbauld reported (and the report is confirmed by Lucy Aikin [q. v.], who heard Scott say it) that Scott told her it was Taylor who made him a poet, a courteous exaggeration. The announcement of the almost simultaneous publication of Scott's version and three others had led Taylor to publish his in the ‘Monthly Magazine’ (just founded by John Aikin) in March 1796; he was paid 6s. for the article. Before the end of the year he published it separately, with the title ‘Ellenore,’ and some improvements, one of them suggested by the version by William Robert Spencer [q. v.]

To 1790 belong also his translations of Lessing's ‘Nathan the Wise’ and Goethe's ‘Iphigenia in Tauris.’ The former was perhaps the later executed, and there is no