Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 56.djvu/14

 miracle which is the subject of one of the triads (Myv. Arch. 1st ser. p. 44).

This is the Llandaff account of Teilo, meant to bring out his position as second bishop of the see. In Rhygyfarch's ‘Life of St. David,’ written before 1099, Teilo appears, on the other hand, as a disciple of that saint (Cambro-British Saints, pp. 124, 135); and, according to Giraldus Cambrensis (Itinerary, ii. 1, MS. d. vi. 102, of Rolls edit.), he was his immediate successor as bishop of St. David's. There is, however, no reason to suppose he was a diocesan bishop at all. Like others of his age, he founded monasteries (many of them bearing his name), and Llandaff was perhaps the ‘archimonasterium’ (for the term see Lib. Land. pp. 74, 75, 129) or parent house (Cymmrodor, xi. 115–16). Dedications to St. Teilo are to be found throughout South Wales; Rees (Welsh Saints, pp. 245–6) gives a list of eighteen, and a number of other ‘Teilo’ churches, which have disappeared or cannot be identified, are mentioned in the ‘Liber Landavensis.’ That David and Teilo worked together appears likely from the fact that of the eighteen Welsh dedications to Teilo all but three are within the region of David's activity, and outside that district between the Usk and the Tawy in which there are practically no ‘Dewi’ churches.

There are no recognised dedications to Teilo in Cornwall or Devon, though Borlase seeks (Age of the Saints, p. 134) to connect him with Endellion, St. Issey, Philleigh, and other places. The two forms of the saint's name, Eliud and Teilo (old Welsh ‘Teliau’), are both old (see the marginalia of the ‘Book of St. Chad,’ as printed in the 1893 edition of the Lib. Land.) Professor Rhys believes the latter to be a compound of the prefix ‘to’ and the proper name Eliau or Eiliau (Arch. Cambr. 5th ser. xii. 37–8). Teilo's festival was 9 Feb.

 TELFAIR, CHARLES (1777?–1833), naturalist, was born at Belfast about 1777, and settled in Mauritius, where he practised as a surgeon. He became a correspondent of Sir William Jackson Hooker [q. v.], sending plants to Kew, and established the botanical gardens at Mauritius and Réunion. He also collected bones of the solitaire from Rodriguez, which he forwarded to the Zoological Society and to the Andersonian Museum, Glasgow. In 1830 he published ‘Some Account of the State of Slavery at Mauritius since the British Occupation in 1810, in Refutation of Anonymous Charges … against Government and that Colony,’ Port Louis, 4to. He died at Port Louis on 14 July 1833, and was buried in the cemetery there. There is an oil portrait of Telfair at the Masonic Lodge, Port Louis, and Hooker commemorated him by the African genus Telfairia in the cucumber family. His wife, who died in 1832, also communicated drawings and specimens of Mauritius algæ to Hooker and Harvey.

 TELFER, JAMES (1800–1862), minor poet, son of a shepherd, was born in the parish of Southdean, Roxburghshire, on 3 Dec. 1800. Beginning life as a shepherd, he gradually educated himself for the post of a country schoolmaster. He taught first at Castleton, Langholm, Dumfriesshire, and then for twenty-five years conducted a small adventure school at Saughtrees, Liddisdale, Roxburghshire. On a very limited income he supported a wife and family, and found leisure for literary work. From youth he had been an admirer and imitator of James Hogg (1770–1835) [q. v.], the Ettrick Shepherd, who befriended him. As a writer of the archaic and quaint ballad style illustrated in Hogg's ‘Queen's Wake,’ Telfer eventually attained a measure of ease and even elegance in composition, and in 1824 he published a volume entitled ‘Border Ballads and Miscellaneous Poems.’ The ballad, ‘The Gloamyne Buchte,’ descriptive of the potent influence of fairy song, is a skilful development of a happy conception. Telfer contributed to Wilson's ‘Tales of the Borders,’ 1834, and in 1835 he published ‘Barbara Gray,’ an interesting prose tale. A selected volume of his prose and verse appeared in 1852. He died on 18 Jan. 1862. 